The ones which are bonkers (but brilliant)

 

The book:  The Raw Shark Texts by Steve Hall

The wine: Le Vin Des Amis 2010, Mas Coutelou

Before we go any further, let's stop for a moment and take a closer look at that wine label.  How many bottles do you see with pictures of naked men on them?  And how often are those men involved in what appears to be some sort of Greco-Roman wrestling? 

No, I didn’t think so.

There’s a distinct lack of Greco-Roman wrestling in The Raw Shark Texts but that didn’t prevent it from becoming one of my favourite books of last year.  I keep trying to explain the story to various people and always end up failing miserably; the best I can come up with is that it’s a bit like film Inception. Which only helps if you’ve seen Inception, and even then it doesn’t help very much because The Raw Shark Texts is nothing like Inception, except for the fact that the plot is completely insane.  Clever and creative and very unique, but still bonkers.  I loved it.

The story opens with a man waking up with no memory of who or where he is; not the most original premise perhaps, but that’s the only  unoriginal thing about this book.  I'm willing to bet that what unfolds will be unlike anything else you've ever read. 

The writing itself is sharp and clever and just a joy to read.  Character descriptions, for instance, don’t come much better than this:

"Maybe there should be types of gardener who visit bookish old men to trim and prune and generally tidy them up occasionally, because the real and actual XXX was as overgrown and tangled as an abandoned allotment. His thick salt-and-pepper hair had grown beyond Einstein-esque into a sort of mad rogue plume. A pen between his teeth, two tucked between his ears and several others tucked and knotted and sticking out of his wild hair, made his head look like one of those deceptively fluffy cacti. Blue, black, red and green biro writing covered the backs of his hands, creeper-vined its way up around wrists and forearms, and towards his rolled-up shirtsleeves, which themselves hadn't entirely been spared.  Scrumpled chunks of paper and collected pages bulged from the pockets of his black schoolboy trousers and patchy threadbare dressing gown.  He was smallish and probably somewhere in his late sixties.  The harsh light from the single bulb didn't make it down through his hair canopy too well and the effect was like looking at a man who was peering out at you from the depths of a wardrobe."

(XXX does have a name but I don't want to use it here in case that spoils your enjoyment of the book. You'll understand how this might happen if you read it.  I'm probably being unnecessarily careful about this, but there we have it.)

Parts of the novel are beautifully tender; there is a section of dialogue between two of the characters which captures the awkwardness of fledgling romance (those earliest moments when you've both realised you really quite like each other but don't have a clue what to do about it) absolutely perfectly.  Equally enchanting is the relationship between Eric, as he eventually discovers he is called, and the love-of-his-life Clio.
 
It's funny, too.  Eric has a cat called Ian: 

"He's a bit of an areshole," I said, thinking about it.
Scout nodded, smiling at this as she poured herself a cup of tea.
"Well, that's what you want in a cat."
I considered and nodded.  "Yeah, actually it is."

I didn’t have to think too hard when it came to finding a wine to match this book.  Even without the nude wrestlers, Le Vin Des Amis is the craziest wine I’ve tasted in a long time. Maybe ever.

 It’s a natural wine, so you’d expect it to be a  bit , um, different - to put things politely.  But in the words (almost) of Tom Jones, this wine is not just unusual, it’s properly weird.  It smells like a farm-yard filled with wet dogs and the flavours are really intense but quite hard to pin down; it’s almost as if there’s been some of that umami paste (the one which concentrates flavours without changing them) added to the bottle.  The flavours I can identify are all things that wine really isn’t supposed to taste like.  Raw meat, for a start.  And it’s quite, well........salty.  (Salty wine which tastes of meat and smells of wet dog.  Are you sold yet?) 

It’s good though.  Really good.  And I’m not the only one to think so; Decanter magazine recently gave it five stars, and make it sound a lot more appetising than I just have. 

The grapes are a blend of Grenache, Syrah, Cinsault and Mouvedre – that last one is where the gamey, savoury notes come from – and at around ten pounds a bottle it’s terrific value.  Of course if money is a bit tight, you could always try challenging your local wine-merchant to wrestle for a bottle instead.