posted on 03 Dec 2023

An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge

Famously nominated for the Booker Prize five times but never coming out the winner, Beryl Bainbridge’s work was finally recognised posthumously by the Booker committee when they created a special ‘Best of Beryl’ award that was voted on by the public. This was, I think, a rather shamefaced admission that Bainbridge had been hard-done-by and that her, often slim but always slyly sharp, novels are little gems that will outlast many of the mainstream Booker winning novels in the affections of the reading public.

Although she turned to historical fictions towards the end of her writing life, for me her best work was usually based on fragments of autobiographical history. Born in Liverpool in 1932, before she became a writer her life and career was already colourful – a brief spell as an actor, a disastrous marriage, a suicide attempt and life as a single mother. But it was at the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s that Bainbridge hit her stride with writing and she published regularly until her final book (published posthumously) – The Girl in the Polka-Dot Dress – in 2011. 

An Awfully Big Adventure was published in 1989 and has claim to be one of Bainbridge’s finest. Stella Bradshaw, an aspiring teenage actress in dismal, war-depressed Liverpool is encouraged by her Uncle and guardian to join a rather down-at-heel repertory troupe that is riddled with petty jealousies, on-off love affairs, and professional antagonisms. Stella – working class, naïve, ambitious and starry-eyed – lands amongst them like a strange catalytic virus.

Stella develops an unshakable passion for the company’s stage director, Meredith Potter but the young girl has overlooked one of the man’s key characteristics – he’s gay. Her innocence of this and her working class gaucheness means that she rattles around the private lives of the actors doing all sorts of damage without really registering the impact. Reviewing the book on its release, Publisher’s Weekly neatly captures the heart of the book:

“Stella has the normal self-consciousness and naivete of adolescence overlaid by a strong will, guilelessness and lack of tact. Her innocent but dangerous impulses and her crush on Meredith, whose homosexuality eludes her, makes Stella a sort of Typhoid Mary of psychological injury; one after another, members of the troupe suffer from her impetuous behavior.”

The real substance of this book comes from the immediacy of the setting and the characters that get artfully sketched with what seems like minimum effort and very few brush strokes. It’s impossible to doubt for even one moment that this is an environment and a set of relationships that Bainbridge herself has witnessed and probably more than once. There’s obviously a big dollop of autobiography in the book but this isn’t get a personal reminiscence but an attempt to take a very different but quite daring and tangential look at the way social class works and what happens when class codes collide.

Paperback copies of the book are easy to find and can be bought quite cheaply. The original Duckworth hardback is a little more expensive but beautifully produced and reassuringly slim.

 

Terry Potter

December 2023