Paradise A L Kennedy Jonathan Cape, 344pp, £14.99 ISBN 0224062581

Hannah Luckraft is in her mid- thirties. She is single, childless, blue-eyed and Scottish, but mainly she is an alcoholic. Bits and pieces of her life bubble to the surface, chunks of biography, unexplained sadness, only to be submerged in another 200 millilitres of Lagavulin or Longrow or Balvenie or Merlot or Rawhide or Quetch or, hang it all, methylated spirits. It's a habit that has taken its toll on her career. Hannah has washed underwear, stacked shelves, cleaned rental power tools, sorted potatoes, telephoned telephone owners to tell them about their telephones - alliteration clearly enjoyed by her author - and sold cardboard. She loses the cardboard job about halfway through the novel. Her real commitment, her true profession, is drinking. Serious drinking, that is, with its natural accompaniments - minor theft, and credit-card fraud, and heartbroken parents, and "giving blow jobs to unpleasant men while semi-unconscious".

Hannah is a laureate of booze in all its forms. She catalogues the ways of being drunk: "chocolate drunk", "sand drunk", "invisible drunk". She catalogues types of drink, their uses and special effects. She might wake up to a "small glass of milk with Cointreau, which is both a fruity bracer and a light breakfast, as long as you get it down before it curdles". Bushmills is better, coming as it does in a handy rectangular bottle that will not roll over and break. Lager is possible although, if purchased mid-morning from your local off-licence, it is wise to add some trinket - a box of matches, say - to imply a simple shopping trip rather than a desperate craving for grog. In the absence of anything better there is always blackcurrant cough syrup, although this has a tendency to glue up your mouth and affect your speech. All this information is interesting in a miserable kind of way. But unfortunately - this is the darndest thing about addicts, isn't it? - she never knows when to stop. Hannah's descriptions are clever, and true, and go on for longer than you really want. Reading them began to affect me rather like the words, "And another really cool thing about methadone is . . ."

The plot of the novel - such as it is, plot being that which drunks usually lose - is a love story. At some indeterminate point - chronology not being much of a virtue, either, among alcoholics - Hannah meets Robert. Robert is a dentist and a drunk (an unhappy thought). They go on a drunken date. They have drunken sex in his car. They have drunken sex in his dentist's chair (another unhappy thought). They fall in love; he goes on the wagon; she goes on the wagon; he falls off the wagon; she falls off the wagon; the wagon disappears into the sunset without either of them on board. It is all utterly convincing because Kennedy can write magnetically well, and it is all agony to read.

It's a tricky decision to have an alcoholic as a narrator. Most people have experienced the narrative drunk. Some will even have been the narrative drunk - will have woken up after a long evening of sparkling conversation and thought: "Oh God." So it seems rich to complain about an honest representation of such a voice. But the fact is, this book lays hold of you like a clammy-handed piss artist with a need to confide. And this in turn provokes familiar emotions - claustrophobia, a sudden need to climb out of the toilet window.

Unfortunately, Kennedy is excellent at describing things. All the unloveableness of the true alcoholic - the narcissism, the sentimentality, the self-serving approach to the world - springs from the page so sensuously that you can almost smell the crusty beer towels and the despair. The pub chunter, the drinking injuries, the paradise lost with each emptied glass: it's all here, all true, and all truly unbearable.

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