William Boyd has never made any secret of his admiration for the writings of Evelyn Waugh.  In his recent compilation of articles, reviews, and other non-fiction, more entries are devoted to Waugh than to any other writer.  These include introductions to Labels and A Handful of Dust, reviews of Collected Travel Writing and the Brideshead Revisited TV adaptation, as well as interviews and articles relating to Boyd’s own TV adaptations of Scoop and Sword of Honour.  There is a retrospective essay on Waugh’s relations with Cyril Connolly as well as another on the occasion of Waugh’s centenary.  In all, nearly 50 pages are devoted to matters Wavian, published by Boyd from 1981 to 2003.
     Boyd’s most well-known connections to Waugh are probably his TV adaptations.  He considers Scoop to be Waugh’s “real masterwork” with “sequences of hilarious comic writing unrivalled in English literature” (610).  He intended his adaptation to be very faithful to the original and was surprised when “Waugh pedants” savaged the TV play for deviating from the text (429).  He was criticized for eliminating what he calls the “Badger joke,” which he could not transfer to drama (429, 455).
     Boyd is less defensive about his four-hour adaptation of Sword of Honour.  The original plan was to have a six-hour version, and he wrote one accordingly.  The decision to cut it to four hours actually made it better, in his opinion.  Although bits were left out, in the “new format we were able to make the narrative lines more graceful and more telling” (430-1). 
     In another article Boyd contrasts Waugh’s fictional description of the evacuation of British troops from Crete – the “big set-piece” of the TV production – with Waugh’s assessment of his own role and that of his fellow officers.  Waugh felt ashamed of his disgraceful flight from Crete along with his commanding officer, Colonel Robert Laycock.  In the novel, Boyd finds “everything is subtly different.”  The Laycock character (Tommy Blackhouse) avoids doing a bunk as an injury keeps him out of action.  Guy Crouchback remains on the beach, escaping at great risk in a small boat along with a few others.  The blame in the novel falls on Ivor Claire, the “aristocratic warrior” Guy had previously idolized, who ignominiously flees.  Notwithstanding this rewriting of events, Boyd finds that Waugh always remained “brutally honest with himself” in his own assessment of the Crete debacle (602-3).
     Boyd also believes that Sword of Honour avoided the pitfalls of the Brideshead TV adaptation, where there was too much voiceover (429, 496).  He considers Brideshead itself to be a seriously flawed novel and “in many respects [Waugh’s] worst book” (490-4).  The weaknesses of the novel contribute to the failure of the TV adaptation.
     In the other articles, Boyd sets out his assessment of Waugh as both a person and a writer.  Indeed, he does this several times, but that is the nature of such unedited collections.  He considers Labels to be underrated and Waugh’s “best and most fascinating” travel book, not least because it reflects Waugh’s reaction to what was perhaps the most significant event in his life – the breakdown of his first marriage (154, 156).  The impact of this event is reflected in some way in most of his subsequent works, including A Handful of Dust, where his portrayal of Brenda Last is so bleak as to be unbelievable, in Boyd’s opinion.  Boyd avers that Waugh wanted to avenge the betrayal and humiliating failure of his own marriage (224-5).  Boyd finds A Handful of Dust to be structurally disjointed and generally overrated, in particular because the ending does not fit the story, a point Waugh himself also conceded to some extent in later editions, where he included an alternate ending used in American serialization of the novel (226-7).
     In an essay on Cyril Connolly, Boyd undertakes an extensive comparison of Connolly and Waugh which does not work to Waugh’s advantage.  While admitting to oversimplification, Boyd contrasts Waugh’s remake of himself “as a parodic Tory squire cum reactionary man of letters” with Connolly’s remaining true to himself “however flawed or inadequate that self happened to be” (205).  This comparison is sharply drawn and defends the vacillating Connolly against the stronger personality of Waugh.  This attack on Waugh as a person seems inconsistent with Boyd’s concentration on his impressive body of work.  No one would suggest that Connolly left a greater literary legacy than Waugh did, no matter how much the latter may have struggled to make himself unlikeable as a person.
     Boyd’s centenary retrospective also contrasts Connolly and Waugh.  It begins by recounting the 1971 University of Texas exhibition of twentieth-century first editions, where Connolly for the first time saw Waugh’s unflattering comments in his copy of The Unquiet Grave.  Boyd sees this incident as a result of the persona Waugh created for himself in the later stages of his life, after the breakdown of Waugh’s first marriage.  This manufactured personality had many manifestations and was what Anthony Powell called “putting on a turn,” something of which Connolly was also guilty but in different ways
(609).
     Boyd believes that Waugh’s “elaborate construct” of his persona, along with publication of his diaries and letters as well as several detailed biographies, “have not helped his posthumous reputation: the man, I feel, has in recent years shouldered the work aside – the life has become more compelling than the fiction” (609-10).  The religiosity of the later works (particularly the “flawed and self-serving” Brideshead) as well as the loss of comedic focus also contributed to a diminution of Waugh’s literary reputation (611-12).  Boyd declares “the four novels of 1928-38 [to be] continuously readable,” excluding Handful of Dust.  The world portrayed is “absurd and indifferent to man’s fate” and the “comedy is triumphantly dark and pitiless” (611).  Boyd urges readers to put aside the image Waugh sought to create for himself and recognize that his fiction contains elements that draw readers to all great novels.  Waugh’s work “tells truths about our human nature and the human condition.”  On balance, notwithstanding the reactionary “turn” he performed in later life, Boyd finds Waugh’s work to show “an enduringly modern spirit (however paradoxical that adjective might seem when applied to Evelyn Waugh),” which “explains why the comic novels continue to beguile readers – provoking both laughter and serious reflection – and will continue to survive” (613).
     While Boyd’s assessment is neither comprehensive nor systematically developed, it is probably sound.  What seems somewhat amiss is his failure to recognize either Put Out More Flags or The Loved One as among the most brilliant satirical novels of the twentieth century.  They are perhaps dated but no more than the pre-war novels he finds continuously readable.  Moreover, it is not clear why Sword of Honour is excluded from the canon.  Aside from its somewhat superficial religiosity, which Boyd mentions, it contains some of the best narrative, characterization and storytelling that Waugh wrote.  Finally, Brideshead, flawed though it may be as a work of literature, continues to be popular and is reported to be under consideration for another film (to be written not by Boyd but by Andrew
Davies).  And even Boyd seems to concede that Anthony Blanche and Ryder père (at least as performed in the TV series) are among Waugh’s best comic creations (494).  Aside from these blind spots, Boyd’s assessment is well written, entertaining, and thought-provoking.  And there is the bonus of nearly 600 pages of non-Wavian material that may provide equally enjoyable reading.

     When I first saw the movie of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, it played to a packed house at the Rialto in South Pasadena.  Within ten minutes, amidst whispers bemoaning the lack of subtitles, the theater had all but emptied, with a just a few stragglers forcing themselves to make sense of the caustic language and content.  Making drugs intelligible, or rather charting their principles of intelligibility, is Marcus Boon’s purview here.
     His process is one of breadth as opposed to depth, premised on writing at the threshold of reality and the imagination.  He recognizes early and often that while drugs, in and of themselves, are perhaps mildly titillating for a few moments, it would be difficult to sustain a book-length narrative without appendages. Following Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, in which despite our supposed sophistication prior belief systems have a habit of cropping up in the present, Boon opts for a multifarious narrative, running discourses from several fields in parallel throughout: “What is called the Romantic attitude to drugs (usually personified by De Quincey) is in fact a much more complicated matrix of historical, cultural, and scientific developments” (6).  In Loves of the Plants, the physician Erasmus Darwin (please assume that everyone I mention henceforth experienced at least one psychoactive substance or another unless stated otherwise) includes poems with his taxonomies, Coleridge planned an epic on medieval alchemy (91), Doctor Syntax in Paris “would appear to contain the earliest known record of dental anesthesia” (94), “Proust’s mind and body were constantly awash in a sea of chemicals that produced precisely the kind of cognitive movements that he describes in his books” (104), Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Jekyll and Hyde are read through their respective authors' use of cocaine (195, 182), a paper by the surgeon William Halsted in the New York Medical Journal does indeed sound more like Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty than science (184), Aldous Huxley--beyond his biologist grandfather, the Doors of Perception, and Brave New World--advised Timothy Leary on his psychological experiments with mushrooms at Harvard (262), only for William Burroughs to dismiss the research as inadequate, the chemists Alexander and Ann Shulgin allocate much of their books on phenethylamines and tryptamines “to a fictional retelling of the author’s [sic] lives, meeting, and subsequent adventures” (271), and even overtly anti-drug literary movements such as Surrealism are defined through their very opposition.  With this broad, evidently plausible, hybrid spectrum in place, spanning everything from Homer to the present, from the culturally high to the low, from the Lake District’s potent laudanum brew, Kendal Black Drop, to crack in contemporary New York, the cipher in the drugs-literature-science triad is the latter, exchangeable for other apparently stable discourses with similar results.  At times, it is a contextualized, political study, re-viewing the Russian Revolution through addiction in M. Ageyev’s Novel with Cocaine, Antonin Artaud’s trip to Mexico as both a thwarted quest for post-revolutionary, indigenous restoration and a more successful discovery of peyote, speed as the system-defying drug of choice for the British working class, stimulants as “weapons in a race war, just as they were elements of a class war for punks – part of a militarization of the body” (211), fascist ideology’s reliance on psychedelics to access some primordial past, or Allen Ginsberg’s version of “drugs as political agents capable of altering mass consciousness” (261) as “not so different from the CIA’s” (261).  For politics, substitute economics, in the guise of De Quincey’s “philosophic master … David Ricardo” (39), opium as “a product of the marketplace” (85), morphine as “a status symbol”
(49), and Angelo Mariani’s cocaine-based wine as “the matrix of stimulant, exoticism, advertising, and worldwide distribution … carried forward into the twentieth century by Coca-Cola” (179).  Boon’s more extensive point in reconstructing this mythically real mélange, whether referring to science, politics, or economics, is that “consciousness is mutable” (273), but our “imagination materializes” (237) and vice versa.  He concludes, with typical breadth, that “the biochemical mapping of all aspects of our lives will continue” (277).  For now, I am less interested in argument than approach, however, and merely hope to have offered a hint of the book’s deliberately shifting modus operandi.
     While there are many possible genealogies, Boon’s chapters are divided by drug.  He proves levelheaded.  The tone is expository, never sanguinely endorsing one substance or rabidly prosecuting another.  Opium and its derivatives seem to induce a false transcendence and prove more hazardous than most, the anesthetics are artistically disappointing, cannabis’s danger is that it exists on the cusp of the social, the stimulant machine complies with the twentieth century’s obsession with speed, and psychedelics tempt the user to believe that the act of taking them is creative.  The material, even anecdotally, speaks for itself, providing a litany of disaffected, solipsistic figures.  Voltaire became enraged by laudanum on his deathbed, thus hastening his demise.  Walter Scott was unable to remember writing The Bride of Lammermoor.  Coleridge called opium a "free-agency-annihilating Poison" (36). Wilkie Collins “bragged on occasion … that the wine glass of laudanum he was in the habit of taking had killed one of his servants who had foolishly tried to imitate him” (42).  Stanislas de Guaita “was found in the toilets at the Place Maubert, unconscious, at the age of thirty, … with a syringe in his pocket, and died two days later at the Pitié Salpetrière” (52), Géza Csáth “hired a detective to follow his family, and finally shot his wife with a revolver in front of their infant daughter” (59), Burroughs shot his “in a drunken game of William Tell” (78), René Daumal, surrealist and experimenter with carbon tetrachloride, “died at the age of thirty-six from tuberculosis” (113), whereas Lester Bangs’s addiction progressed from cough syrup to amphetamines and “his death, at the age of thirty-four, appears to have been the result of an overdose of the sedatives Darvon and Valium” (205).  On a lighter note, Freud’s sweet nothings to Bernays include “I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump.  And if you are forward, you shall see who is stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body” (183).  Remarkably, the only voice of reason permeating the book is that of Michel Foucault: “‘Drugs,’ scowled Foucault, ‘have nothing to do with truth or falsity: only to fortunetellers do they reveal a world more truthful than the real’” (237).  For many, and Boon makes this point on several occasions, it seems that drugs simply offered material, whether real or metaphorical, for books that would otherwise have been rather blank.
     The argumentation, if the reader cares to piece it together, works paradoxically, either through drugs’ internal aphanisis or through their inherent connection to other discourses.  Use, though apparently self-destructive, requires at least some sense of order, the discipline necessary to afford, find, prepare, and administer such substances.  Baudelaire’s poetry shuns material conditions yet required drugs’ material assistance in order to write it.  If the premise is to forsake the body in favor of a more transcendental self, then how does one explain away the body’s chemical mutation in order to achieve it?  In the case of morphine, as Boon has it, “the body was transcended only to be replaced by another kind of body, that of a morphine addict, which, far from being freed from the repugnant qualities of the material world, was ever more reliant on precisely the set of forces that it sought to escape” (53).  Once high, it seems difficult for the user to distinguish between moments of true and false (since drug-induced) gnosis.  Excess stunts excess.  Dr Paolo Mantegazza’s experimentation with coca leaves did indeed lead to high-speed thought, but “no corresponding complexity of mental imagery accompanied it” (178).  There is even an intermittent argument suggesting that our dependence on drugs in order to flee from reality merely produces more progressive science and therefore more of the reality we were fleeing from in the beginning.
     Beyond this immediate dependence, communicating the experience in the lulls between the highs is similarly self-defeating, pushing “the limits of language only to find itself within language” (242).  Drugs are still in need of some form of symbology, whether we prefer Junkie’s glossary, Sartre’s italics, or Daumal's absurd “Tem gwef tem gwef dr rr rr” (115).  They are also reliant, contrary to the more radical claims, upon the medical establishment, which is often ahead of the writers in terms of experimentation and “can now produce normative states” (277).  As Burroughs himself admits, “there’s not much variation in narcotic addiction itself” (84), so again, however criminal such activities may appear, they are also tied to the state’s shifting legal machinery in order to produce new material.  In 1937, Harry Anslinger, the commissioner of the Federal Narcotics Bureau, references both the Odyssey and Marco Polo’s Travels in an invective against marihuana, thus institutionalizing literature as an anti-drug.  The same bureau then proceeded to lambaste a series of anti-marihuana publications for being “too sensationalist” (157).  Users have their own internal moral codes, via which some substances are suitable and others are either reactionary or newfangled, depending on one’s perspective.  Even if we assume that we have escaped institutionalization through a neo-Nietzschean sickness-is-health argument, cunningly inverting society’s terms, it turns out that Baudelaire “chose to celebrate and even market moral failure” (46) long ago, and that a similar version of “the sublime plays a major role in a large portion of our cultural and recreational industries – from Hollywood thrillers to bungee jumping” (38). Whether any of these, and particularly drugs, satisfy a postmodern craving for a replacement for religion is debatable, but the moral awareness, the quest for even pseudo-gnosis, remains.  The Asian mystery surrounding Romanticism’s fascination with opium is portrayed as but another form of reductive Orientalism, one that becomes particularly sinister from a postcolonial perspective when applied to North American xenophobia regarding Mexican immigration and marihuana.  In short, Boon exposes the fallacy of drugs as a counterculture.  Queen Victoria used anesthesia in childbirth, in the twenties “the typical narcotics user … was not a wide-eyed, thrill-seeking young person, but usually a middle-aged or elderly person who had become addicted in the course of medical therapy” (63), amphetamines were offered to U.S. troops in the Korean War, and the vice president of J. P. Morgan was on psychedelics in the fifties.  As Boon avers, “the world is not a neutral space” (216).
     My qualm is that all of the above is undersold.  This is partly mechanical, but to such an extent that it affects the content.  Boon attempts to absolve himself from critical concerns in the initial pages, warning that “Those who read this book hoping for a neatly packaged answer to ‘the drug problem,’ or a clever all-encompassing theory about the relationship between drugs and literature, will be disappointed” (14), but the random, staccato style and open-ended thought prove at best frustrating and at worst flaccid, hijacking the reader rather than constructing “an assemblage in the Deleuzian sense” (8).  Where Deleuze had immanence as a unifying principle, Boon has drugs, a pathological old boys’ club, when perhaps at least a little more theoretical gravitas would have directed the arguments more convincingly.  The snippets of information read like a series of embryonic ideas that never quite gel with each other and never reach fruition in their own right, which means the whole is less than the sum of its parts.  There is surely a danger, given this subject, in becoming one’s material, yet we are quickly confronted with the rhetorical question “Is it possible to overdose on books?” (2).  One of the reasons Foucault steals the limelight is that, regardless of how one may feel about the Foucauldian project, there is an obvious plan and highly polished prose.  Boon could use more scowling himself.  By no means a comprehensive history (while the reviewer from the New Scientist, cited on the back cover, may think that Will Self is included, he is nowhere to be found), nor a theoretical treatise, it is perhaps best described as annotated anthology, or a rehashed dissertation.  Much of it would not even be considered lit. crit. in the conventional sense.  Why not either write a longer, more comprehensive history, or a shorter, more detailed study of one of the plethora of potential arguments (on religion, morality, postcolonialism, politics and, of course, drugs) strewn across these pages?  The relative and explicit absence of theory means that primary reading dominates, obscuring the secondary and tertiary fields on the subject.  What was wrong with Lawrence Driscoll’s Reconsidering Drugs: Mapping Victorian and Modern Drug Discourses, or Eijun Senaha’s Sex, Drugs, and Madness in Poetry from William Blake to Christina Rossetti: Women’s Pain, Women’s Pleasure, or John Lardas’ The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, or High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction, by Janet Brodie and Marc Redfield, all of which were readily available when The Road of Excess was but a manuscript?  While a cautious introduction is no doubt prudent, Boon ventures that “Iceberg Slim, Colette, and Martin Heidegger all confront being through their writings in their own ways, and I for one would have to think very carefully before I chose which one of them I would like to be my guide to its mysteries” (8), yet he is about to become our guide to this very dilemma.  He sets out what he achieves and then more or less complies with it, rather than vice versa.  Although we are promised a rehistoricized view of drugs that will encompass antiquity and the Renaissance, with Boon deriding the lack of criticism on drug use in Milton et al. (221), there are only sporadic mentions of the premodern, and De Quincey and Burroughs (i.e., an easily intelligible, recreational version of drugs) dominate the book.  It is not quite enough to isolate texts where dream and reality intersect, without explaining the intersection.  If we accept that Proust’s writing was influenced more by chemicals than a madeleine (104), or that Burroughs sought “a proliferation of alternative methods of attaining gnosis” (86) beyond narcotics, my questions are “so what?” and “such as?” respectively, neither of which is even remotely answered via these guerrilla tactics that ensure that no risks are taken.  Is the real reason for reading merely to shock, to overdose, as the introduction implies?
     On a lighter note, some of the micro-mechanics may prove irritating.  From my perspective, the difficulty with apostrophes, titles in Spanish, and the misquoting of Mark E. Smith in the epigraph (Boon has it as “The palace of excess leads to the palace of excess”, thus corroborating later paradoxes, whereas it should read “The palace of excess leads to the palace of access”, yet another endorsement of self-glorification) are among the more irksome.
     Sadly, there is no Waugh.  The most obvious rationale would be that these characters are more hardcore than just a tad “tight,” but I would also like to think that the irony of paradoxes would be deflated by the inclusion of the ironist par excellence, one who had already and repeatedly turned excess against itself long before Boon.  Reading this book is more akin to catching a glimpse of the low-end dealers on the corner of your block, or at the park; mildly interesting, perhaps even suggestive at first, though ultimately just a bunch of youths in anoraks in need of a shower.  It’s methadone to Waugh’s heroin.