Nightclubs in Fiction - A Top 10

There is a long and varied history of great pubs in literature from Chaucer to Graham Swift, but what of our great fictional nightclubs? Ther weren't many options for Falstaff as he staggered out of the Boar's Head, the chimes of midnight ringing in his ears, but a modern reveller has plenty of opportunities to carry on their evening, with the promise of music, drink, drugs and sex. The nightclub is a natural setting for the carnivalesque, for characters to reveal new facets of their personalities, for chance meetings and for scandal - and the first nighclub visit is as much a modern rite of passage as the first coming out ball was for Austen's characters. So over the next two weeks, I'll be picking ten of the most memorable nightspots in fiction. Feel free to make your own suggestions in the comments.

Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall

Neil Bartlett’s first novel is a love affair between O, an older man, and the shockingly beautiful Boy. As part of Boy’s awakening, he is gradually exposed to the stories and legends of The Bar, a repository of gay subculture. At first, O tells us, The Bar was hidden next to an undertakers, with ‘no name written up or sign... Madame preferred it like that’. Within this space, the regulars (Stella, The Troll, Miss Public House and That Awful Hugh Hapsely) carry on their ‘promiscuous, public and semi-professional’ affairs. The fashions in drink (‘for some years you could get liqueur glasses of violently alcoholic black coffee, after one of the barstaff had come back from an affair with a sailor in some german port’) and music change, but the nature of The Bar remained constant: ‘you could live just how you wanted, according to certain rules. But the point was that they were our own rules. And that was into all of this that Boy made his entrance.’

Novel With Cocaine - M Ageyev

Vadim Maslennikov, the novel’s protagonist, is desperate to escape his humble origins and live a life of glamour in pre-Revolutionary Russia. After his tumultuous schooldays he falls in with the alluring Sonia, who introduces him to the dark side of Moscow, taking him to a speakeasy. The bar is a confusion of noise, as the patrons attempt to drown out the sound of the entertainers: ‘The violinist, legs spread wide and torso writhing, radiated an embarrassingly lascivious pleasure in his own sonorities, although his joyfully insistent attempts to attract attention went absolutely ignored’. In a back room, Vadim is introduced to Hirghe and Mik, who brusquely provide him with the narcotic to which he will become addicted.

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

Nightclubs are a test of social etiquette which some characters are unprepared for. Esther’s experience in an unnamed New York bar is a study in awkwardness - paired off with a shorter man, she is already feeling ‘gawky’ when she is thrown by having to order drinks: ‘I didn’t know whiskey from gin’. In the dark, Esther’s companion Doreen dazzles in her whereas she feels herself slipping away into the background, ‘like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life’. Fortunately for Esther, while the dim bar and her ‘scrunty’ companion disappoint, the drink ‘went straight into my stomach like a sword-swallower’s sword and made me feel powerful and godlike’.

Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh

For Renton and friends, nightclubs are an ordeal to be endured with one end in mind. So, after kicking heroin, he finds himself ‘getting pished in a tacky chrome-and-neon meat market’, which ‘misses by miles the cocktail bar sophistication it is aiming at’. With some speed in his system, he spots Dianne, ‘a slim girl with straight blondish hair and visible panty lines’. They argue about the politics of Simple Minds (‘pure shite since they jumped on the committed, passion-rock bandwagon’), and Dianne realises that Renton is ‘a bit of an arsehole, but the place is full of them, and he seems a bit different’. He gets stuck in a conversation with someone from Liverpool, but catches her at the taxi rank, and decides to go back for coffee...

The Golem - Gustav Meyrinck

The Golem is a fantastical document of life in the Prague Ghetto, a sunless, fragmented world deeply imbued with mysticism and the supernatural. In this demi-monde, populated with hustlers and penniless scholars, the cabaret thrives, in particular Salon Loisitchek. Hidden behind a red-curtained window, the Salon is hosted by ‘a big, burly fellow with black brilliantined hair and no collar, but a green silk tie around his bare neck and the waistcoat of his dress suit adorned with a bunch of pig’s teeth’.

The club itself is wreathed in pungent tobacco smoke, the chairs are ripped, and the clientele is made up of pimps and prostitutes. The entertainment is disconcerting even to those used to the vagaries of ghetto life - a double act featuring a blind old man ‘with the long white beard of an Old Testament prophet’ and a woman who is ‘the picture of hypocritical bourgeoise respectability’. The woman plays a ‘wild jumble of notes’ from an ‘exhausted’ accordion, as her partner yells Hebrew blessings. To add to the confusion, the Salon is raided by the police, who are embarrassed to find the Prince Athenstadt in attendance, and forced to flee.