Beryl Bainbridge – Sweet William

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Beryl Bainbridge, Book Review, Sweet William

The implacable carnage wreaked by a charming seducer

Beryl Bainbridge’s Sweet William, here reissued as a digital version by Open Road Media, is a short tale of a foolishly naïve woman (or women) and a man sophisticated in deception – including self-deception

Published in 1975 there is, as often with Bainbridge, a degree of events in her real life acting as springboard to the story.

The William of the title is William McClusky an up-and-coming playwright. He has a fascinating mix of the fiercely wilful, creative and seemingly unworldly persona, theoretically tender and emotionally expressive manner and boyish appealing loucheness which can effectively set womanhood’s heart a-flutter. The springboard for Bainbridge was that this character was modelled on the novelist and screenwriter Alan Sharp, with whom she had a daughter.

The central character of the book, into whose life William strolls like an out-of-control juggernaut, is Ann Walton, a naïve young woman working for the BBC. Ann comes from a determinedly ‘keeping up middle class values’ background, her mother implacably wanting Ann to fulfil some social dream of her own, and unable to embrace the daughter she really has. Ann is engaged to Gerald, an academic, off to America on a placement. Gerald is a selfish, bullish and rather cold man. Marrying an academic and one with prospects in America does however initially, theoretically, meet with the aspirational Mrs Walton’s approval.

Things don’t quite go to plan when Ann is determinedly picked up by William, who sweeps her off her feet with his touchy feely passion and freely expressed need and desire for her. Unfortunately, William is married and he still maintains all sorts of connections with his wife Edna – including sexual. And it turns out that there is more than one significant earlier relationship in William’s life. And later ones too. He is incapable of resisting the desire to conquer the heart, not to mention the haunches, of any woman he meets. His deadly charm is that he is not a cold seducer, but believes himself to be a loving man, who just happens to love a lot of women at once and have them all meet his needs for love, care, affection and meals, all at once

When the doorbell rang Ann was amazed to see a messenger boy on the landing, holding a large white cake with pink ribbon, crowned with flaring candles of red and gold.

‘Mrs McClusky’ he said ‘Special delivery’

It was Edna’s birthday……’He said I was to expect a surprise’ she cried, her face glowing….She insisted they cut into the cake

Ann didn’t know what to say. It was such an extraordinary thing to do, sending your wife a cake to the flat of another woman. She couldn’t for the life of her wish Edna many happy returns of the day.

They sat opposite each other, mouths blocked with the birthday surprise, a faint lingering smell of wax in the room

Even those around Ann who can see William for the philanderer he is, and will warn Ann that he is not a man to be remotely trusted, will not be immune to his charms, though some of the other women are only interested in a bit of good time sex with him, and have no fond illusions of forever.

The reader (well this one) felt both sorry for the foolish Ann, but also thoroughly exasperated by her. And by the rest of William’s entourage. And by William himself. Sometimes, ‘Williams’ are usefully spotted a mile off, but sometimes they possess an ability to hide in plain sight…..

The book was turned into a film in 1980, with Jenny Agutter as Ann and Sam Waterston as William. It was directed by Claude Whatham, with the screenplay written by Bainbridge herself

I read this as a review copy published by the excellent Open Road Media as a digital version

Sweet William Amazon UK
Sweet William Amazon UK

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Beryl Bainbridge – Harriet Said

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Beryl Bainbridge, Book Review, Harriet Said

The Corruption of Innocence

I surrendered into reading Beryl Bainbridge’s first novel with great delight. Harriet Said shows Bainbridge’s lush, dark, comedic writing was perfectly placed from the start. Originally written in 1958, the book did not find a publisher until 1972, because its story-line and characters were thought to be repulsive. It was only because later written and published books – A Weekend With Claude, Another Part of the Woods, in the late 60s had established Bainbridge as a class, unique voice, that this earlier book found its publisher

A shocking crime had been committed by two teenage girls in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1954, the Parker-Hulme case. It was the nature of the crime, the fact that it was premeditated, and that two girls, aged 15 and 16, who should, according to the thinking of the time, have been innocent, sweet young things, which was so deeply disturbing. Bainbridge takes this into her rather different story, which nonetheless has supposedly innocent girls with a corrupting friendship, a potential power struggle for supremacy between the two, and the involvement of lonely, weak, predatory men.

She drops the ages of her protagonists by a couple of years, making events still more shocking. Set on the North-West coast, shortly after the end of the Second World War, it is the long summer holiday. The un-named narrator is 13 years old, She is not the favoured child in her family. Her mother gives all her love to her youngest child, and there are clearly tensions between her parents. Her best friend is the prettier, more knowing 14 year old Harriet. Harriet looks younger, more girlish, less womanly than her 13 year old friend. Harriet is hugely manipulative, not just of her friend, but also of her own mother. She too comes from a family where the dynamics are not particularly healthy. The relationship between the two girls causes great unease, and attempts have been made to separate them; the thirteen year old has been sent away to school to try and break that friendship. There have been ‘incidents’ with young men previously, Italian POWs from a nearby camp. And these may have been instigated by the girls. Each is seen as a potentially corrupting influence on the other

           Jelly fish, Formby Beach, photo by Colin Lane

This is a novel about the power a young girl can feel she has when she realises her allure, and wants to play with the fire of her power. Team two girls together, with a relationship between them which supports dysfunction further, and where neither has the checks and balances which might be given by healthy family dynamics and disturbing things can happen

One publisher rejected her book, at the time of first submission on these grounds:

what repulsive little creatures you have made the two central characters, repulsive almost beyond belief! And I think the scene in which the two men and the two girls meet in the Tsar’s house is too indecent and unpleasant even for these lax days. What is more, I fear that even now a respectable printer would not print it!.

‘The Tsar’ is the nickname the girls give to a weak, 60 year old man, unhappily married, whom one of them has a crush on.

Slightly unsober, slightly dishevelled, always elegant, he swayed moodily past us through all the days of our growing up

No one is ‘off the hook’ in this one – instead, there is an acknowledgement of all-round culpability, though the adults ‘should’ have been the ones taking control of their daughters.

And it is the writing which makes this a terrific book, a shocking book – but not a salacious, lingering, gratuitous one.

Bainbridge’s mordant humour and her artist’s eye (she was also a fine painter) create arresting, unusual, captivating images :

At the gate of the Canon’s house stood a group of men, standing in a circle with legs like misshapen tulips, trousers tied at the knee with string

The subject is shocking, the writing is delicious. She has the ability to lure the reader in, give them the comfort of her craft, so you sink beneath the words as into a warm bath – only to find that under the fragrant bubbles, the bath is full of razor blades.

So, here, early in the novel, the two friends go mooching along the Formby coast:

All the time I kept looking for interesting objects left stranded by the tide. There were no end of things Harriet and I had found. Whole crates of rotten fruit, melons and oranges and grapefruit, swollen up and bursting with salt water, lumps of meat wrapped in stained cotton sheets through which the maggots tunnelled if the weather was warm, and stranded jelly fish, purple things, obscene and mindless. Harriet drove sticks of wood into them but they were dead

I love the way she builds unease, image on image, and we know, instantly, Harriet is a dangerous young girl. But she is also an imaginative, reflective and rather astute one. The girls have kept a kind of journal (Harriet’s) for years. Harriet dictates what shall be written in the book, the un-named narrator writes it

All the best parts in the book were written years ago when we didn’t know the proper names for things. We are limited now by knowing how to express ourselves. It sounds worse perhaps, but we can’t go back

I was offered a digital version of this, as an ARC, by the excellent Open Road Media, who are bringing this out in digital version in the States on November 1st. As always, with this company, the digitisation is excellently done

The original Parker-Hulme case had been rather different in its trajectory than this story Bainbridge wove from the dangerous friendship of two corrupt, yet naïve young girls. It had inspired Peter Jackson’s 1994 film, Heavenly Creatures, which told the original story. In a weird postscript, journalists searching for what had happened to the two teenagers, found that though they had had no further contact with each other, they were both now living in Scotland, less than 100 miles distance from each other. And one of them was a fairly well known popular novelist. It almost sounds like a fictional plot twist, one which, perhaps a novelist would have rejected as too contrived to be employed. Truth often stranger than fiction, and all that.

I also remembered two earlier shout outs on this one so an pingy thingying excellent reviews by cleopatralovesbooks and also by HeavenAli

There is nothing ‘supernatural’ in this, but it does seem an apposite post for All Hallow’s Eve,  as there is definitely a sulphurous whiff of evil afoot – human malevolence though, which perhaps we project onto ‘supernatural forces’ precisely because we don’t want to own what we can be wickedly capable of, all by ourselves

Harriet Said Amazon UK
Harriet Said Amazon USA

Beryl Bainbridge – An Awfully Big Adventure

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An Awfully Big Adventure, Beryl Bainbridge, Book Review, Literary Fiction

Priestley’s Good Companions smacked about by Joe Orton

The Good Companions is a lovely, warm, fuzzy, well written book (a favourite of mine) about the trials, tribulations, triumphs and tragedies of a small travelling music hall company in the 1920s

Jump forwards 30 years to the setting of Bainbridge’s book about the trials, tribulations, triumphs (very few) and tragedies (quite a lot) of a Liverpool repertory company. Originally published in 1989, Bainbridge draws upon some of her own experiences as an actor around that time.

Gone is Priestley’s enjoyable, rather sentimental approach. Instead, we have a blackly, bleakly funny and unholy mixture of sex, love, death and religion, all wrapped up in an atmosphere of lower middle-class prurience and things which are not quite nice and musn’t be mentioned (Orton’s territory)

This is the story of Stella, an awkward, difficult, naive and impressionable mid-teens. She is also adept at wearing a don’t tangle with me mask, making her appear much more hard-boiled and insensitive than she really is. Strings are pulled to get her a job as an ASM in the rep company, as her imaginative, rather histrionic abilities at play-acting her way through her life, suggest to those around her that she may have a theatrical gift.

Bainbridge structures her book beautifully, setting something up at the start, which is only finally revealed at the end, when she collapses, one by one, her house of cards, with a selection of hinted at revelations which are simultaneously as bleak, horribly funny, and shocking as Orton. There is as much going on here as there are in some of the major themes of Greek tragedy, except Bainbridge does the great trick of wrapping the tragedy with absurd, comedic touches.

I’m working through re-reading Bainbridge, following my reading of the wonderful Beryl Bainbridge: Artist, Writer, Friend which connects her life, her writing and her art, and this was a fabulous re-read.

An Awfully Big Adventure Amazon UK
An Awfully Big Adventure Amazon USA

Psiche Hughes – Beryl Bainbridge, Artist, Writer, Friend

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Arts:Crafts:Humanities, Beryl Bainbridge, Beryl Bainbridge: Artist Writer Friend, Biography, Book Review, Psiche Hughes

A darkly playful, vibrant life – and oh, the pictures!,

I was so pleased to get this book, gracefully written.

I must confess it was the artist part of the title, and the promise of the illustrations which captivated me into wanting this book, and hearing it talked about on the radio. Bainbridge’s writing is often blackly comedic, but the pictures are a revelation, a combination of vibrant colour, a blazing kind of naive wonder, delicate etching and unfettered imagination. These are certainly skilful works, but her lack of intense formal training is a plus, not a minus – these works do not seem to belong to some school, or observe some dictate of what is acceptable and what is not, and the almost rustic, homely quality which shines out is joyful and accessible.

Psiche Hughes book is written warmly, an affectionate portrayal of her friend, weaving incidents from her life, the art and the writing together.

The book itself is beautifully presented, any e-version must be disappointing, this is one of those books which makes the reader appreciate the whole experience of looking at, handling, and breathing in a physical book, the quality of the pages, the gloss on the plates, the vibrant gold bookmark.

I really did love this, and it will send me back to re-read Bainbridge’s work, through the life and art connections Hughes explores.

I received it as a review copy through the Amazon Vine Programme UK
Beryl Bainbridge: Artist, Writer Friend Amazon UK
Beryl Bainbridge: Artist, Writer Friend Amazon USA