A wicked thirst

Paradise
By A. L. Kennedy
Knopf, 288 pp., $25

Hannah Luckraft is a drinker. Underemployed -- she sells cardboard crates to fruit farmers -- and lurching toward middle age, she is a fixture at her local pub. A copious private stash sustains her in emergencies, which are frequent: last calls, migraine headaches, debilitating hangovers. Whenever possible, she drinks herself unconscious. Getting, and staying, this loaded require conscientious daily effort. As Hannah notes dryly, ''Being me is a job."

It is Hannah's voice -- wry, insightful, and often hilarious -- that animates this astonishing book, the fifth novel published in the United States by Scottish writer A. L. Kennedy. The author of the diabolically twisted love stories ''So I Am Glad" and ''Original Bliss" goes a step beyond in ''Paradise," an intimate look at one woman's fatal love affair with alcohol. This is a wiser, braver, and sweeter work than we have yet seen -- Kennedy's greatest achievement to date.

''How it happens," the novel begins, ''is a long story, always." We meet Hannah as she emerges from a blackout, her disorientation total and, to the reader, utterly terrifying. Through a series of calm deductions, she determines that she is in a hotel near an airport. ''At uneasy intervals the walls display reproductions of old European advertisements: a British hotel, then. This particular level of grisliness could only be fully achieved in the British Isles." Gradually she reconstructs the previous few days of her life: an escape from a clinic in Canada, a flight to Budapest, the theft of a credit card, and a grim sexual encounter with a stranger, the details of which return to her in a rush. Fortifying herself with three cans of lager, she hops a train home to Scotland -- to her locals and to Robert, her one true love.

Like Hannah, Robert is a career drinker. They meet carousing at an acquaintance's wedding and recognize in each other what Hannah calls ''the drinker's smile." Looking at an old photograph, she explains, ''The man beside me shares precisely my expression, equally absolving and untouchable and tenderly alight. We are the only ones: any observer would quickly pick us out and say we are alike." Their attachment to each other is tender, primal, profane. They go on weekend benders in Dublin and London, and compose an exhaustive catalog of every flavor of drunkenness: sweet drunk, mad drunk, bad drunk, chocolate drunk (''if you were chocolate, you'd eat yourself"). Hannah, like her creator, enjoys playing with language; Kennedy's remarkable sentences bring to mind a stripped-down Alan Hollinghurst: dense with meaning, yet beautifully formed.

Fueled by alcohol, the romance runs a rocky course: bouts of illness, brutal arguments half-forgotten in the morning. Both try rehab and fail. When Robert quits drinking, Hannah makes do with a daily bottle of cough syrup (''Each purchase is a joy," she explains, ''because cough mixture isn't a drink and if you're not drinking a drink, then you can't be drinking"). When he falls off the wagon she is there, joyfully, to catch him, bottle in hand -- a favor he will inevitably return.

The couple's boozy, fitful, truculent fall into love is what moves the story forward -- the only thing, besides drink, that moves Hannah at all. Tragically, these two passions lead her in the same direction, toward her ultimate destruction.

I'm not giving anything away here. ''Paradise" doesn't promise a happy ending; indeed, from Page 1 there is a chilling inexorability to the story. As Hannah herself explains it, ''My condition does indeed mean that I'm ruined without drink and yet, equally, drink will save me from all of my ruinations: those it inspires and every single other trouble, large and small." Drink is her secret weapon, her ''one and perfect gift."

Novels about alcoholism are nothing new -- writers from Hardy to Joyce to Hemingway have produced inspired prose on the subject -- but ''Paradise" offers some of the most vividly sensual descriptions of drinking in contemporary literature. The pub is the center of Hannah's world, and Kennedy renders it with grace: the fast friendships, the tipsy banter devolving into gibberish as the evening wears on. Temporarily on the wagon, Hannah telephones Robert late at night and listens thirstily: ''His breath is magnified by what I can tell is a glass. He swallows and I swallow, too. . . . I'm aware of precisely the pace it will gather as it kisses down his throat and between his shoulders, as it slips beside his heart."

''Paradise" never resorts to facile explanations for Hannah's addiction; there is no dark secret of childhood trauma or privation. For her aging parents she feels a fierce tenderness, its intensity nearly crippling. In rehab, eight days sober, she finds herself overcome by unaccustomed emotion: ''You wake before dawn and, eyes still shut, you're already going full tilt at remembering a sandwich you ate in school with the best friend you haven't seen for twenty years and you immediately miss her to the point of weeping and then progress to worrying that she's dead."

This is as close as Kennedy comes to suggesting why Hannah drinks: a fervent wish for anesthesia and, ultimately, oblivion -- the ''paradise" of the title. ''There is nothing unnatural about it, nothing dreadful," Hannah explains. ''Some level of blacking out is what lets most people survive." The book's final pages deliver a shocking and utterly convincing glimpse of what Hannah's paradise looks like: the mental and spiritual annihilation she's been chasing, viewed from the inside.

Jennifer Haigh is the author of the novels ''Mrs. Kimble" and ''Baker Towers."