There were good times and bad times, but in the beginning there
were more good times. When I first met Candy those were the days of
juice, when everything was bountiful. Only much later did it all
start to seem like sugar and blood, blood and sugar. . . It's like
you're cruising along in a beautiful car on a pleasant country road
with the breeze in your hair and the smell of eucalyptus all around
you. The horizon is always up there ahead, unfolding towards you,
and at first you don't notice the gradual descent, or the way the
atmosphere thickens. Bit by bit the gradient gets steeper, and
before you realise you have no brakes, you're going pretty fucking
fast.'
Candy is a love story. It is also a novel about addiction.
From the heady narcissism of the narrator s first days with his new
lover, Candy, and the relative innocence of their shared habit,
Candy charts their decline. Candy becomes a prostitute, the
narrator becomes a scam artist, and smack becomes the total and
only focus of their lives. But this is not just another junkie
novel: Davies is a very fine writer and Candy is
confronting, painful, sexy, tender and at times darkly hilarious. A
remarkable novel.
