Tag Archives: Beryl Bainbridge

Book review

Every Man for Himself by Beryl Bainbridge, 2002

Half past four on the afternoon of 8th April 1912 – the weather was mild and hyacinths bloomed in window boxes – a stranger chose to die in my arms. “Please,” I said, as he pitched forward and clutched me round the waist. We both fell to our knees. Over the road a crocodile of Girl Guides sashayed sing-song through the ornamental gates of the public gardens.

I wrote some time back about my policy of avoiding reading much, if anything, about a novel before reading the novel itself. Apart from the obvious risk of spoilers, pre-reading can influence your reaction to a book, shaping it in a certain direction. For example, if you are told a novel is ‘a work of genius’ it might encourage you to overlook any flaws you identify in it. A similar problem occurred after I read Beryl Bainbridge’s book about the Titanic disaster, Every Man for Himself, when I came across this article she wrote in the Guardian in 2009. In it she describes the process of negotiating a new contract with her publisher:

“I’d been about to seek another publisher, one who would offer me money, and told Baird-Smith that I was willing to stay with him if he granted me a three-book contract, something miraculous I’d heard of in regard to other authors. When he asked me what themes I was considering, from the top of my head I blurted out Scott going to the pole, the sinking of the Titanic and the Crimean war. Baird-Smith then offered me a substantial advance, which shook me; I wasn’t used to payments.”

Bainbridge was true to her word, writing Master Georgie about the Crimean War, The Birthday Boys about the Scott Polar expedition, and Every Man for Himself. Does it matter that Bainbridge was writing to order rather than being genuinely inspired by her subject matter? A bit, yes. Because I think it shows in the novel itself. The writing is rather ‘by the numbers’ and only sporadically shows a real interest in the subject matter. Most of the novel sees the characters in a holding pattern, running up the word count and down the clock until the iceberg strikes.

As a thought exercise, imagine you were the author in this situation, committed to writing a novel about the Titanic. How would you go about addressing the central challenge of this scenario, which is obviously the lack of any suspense about the overall ending? The first thing you would do, I would suggest, is try to make your central character or characters people the reader cares about, wanting to know whether they survive – in other words you reframe the question ‘What happens?’ to ‘What happens to X?’ This would involve giving the character a backstory and the reader a reason to care about them. The other element I think the hypothetical novel would need would be some depth – for example consideration of social issues or class. The differential in survival rates on the Titanic – 62% of first-class passengers survived, against only 24% of third class passengers (41% for second class if you were interested) – has always struck me as something worth detailed analysis. Was it because the first-class passengers were prioritised in the evacuation and in life-boat spaces, or was it more to do with where they were in the ship when the collision occurred? (To be clear, I am 100% sure that this differential has been analysed very fully by historians – I just don’t think the issues have ever been explored by novelists). And then there’s the crew, who had to supervise the evacuation and enforce the ‘women and children first’ protocol, many of whom stayed behind to carry out their duties to the last minute. The Titanic sinking has so many dramatic stories, conflicts, moments of tension and so on that it would be almost impossible to write a novel that didn’t engage the reader in the drama of the situation.

And yet….

Every Man for Himself tells the story of the sinking of the Titanic through the eyes of one of the first-class passengers, 22 year-old Morgan, part of a very wealthy banking family. Morgan is an orphan who was brought up relatives. Before boarding the ship he sees a man who has fallen onto some railings, dying in a rather clumsy piece of foreshadowing. Once onboard he spends his time socialising with the other first class passengers. He shows some interest in the construction of the ship (having worked on some aspects of its design – presumably the author providing us with a reason to care a little more about the outcome?) and finds out that it set sail with a fire in one of the coal holds not completely under control. There are also occasional mentions of warnings from other ships about icebergs ahead. But the Titanic was unsinkable, so there is nothing to worry about…. He is attracted to socialite Wallis Ellery, who flirts with him while all the time having a fling with one of the other passengers, but he recovers fairly quickly when he finds this out.

The Titanic’s evacuation order (which, from what I can tell, was a long-established protocol) was the very opposite of the novel’s title – not ‘every man for himself’ but ‘women and children first’ – an order that was largely voluntarily complied with. I think the author chose this title as a commentary on the behaviour of the first-class passengers prior to the collision, where their personal interests, well-being and finances are prioritised over everyone else. Every man for himself was the spirit of the age.

Bainbridge does her best to differentiate the large cast of characters, but at times they blurred into one another. Everyone seems to know everyone else (Morgan even knows the captain). This privileged social circle is intimate and hostile to outsiders. Morgan describes his first dinner on board thus:

Dinner that evening was a boisterous affair. Ours was a small world and between the soup and the fish we were all constantly bobbing up and down to acknowledge people we knew; but for the intermittent and minute flickerings of the electric lights we might have been dining at the Ritz in Paris. The Thayers stopped at our table, the Daniels, Mrs Snyder, the Speddens of Tuxedo
Park, Colonel Gracie, jolly Mrs Hogeboom with the excessively ritual eccentric Mrs James Brown, her bridge crony from Denver, in tow. As usual, the latter was dressed inappropriately and wore a gigantic hat across whose brim languished an entire stuffed bird. Colonel Astor and his young bride passed by without a nod, leaving Ginsberg on his feet with his hand held foolishly out. He said he knew Vincent, the colonel’s older son, and had often fenced with him.

Most of these characters are not mentioned again and are just passing across the stage, mildly comically, to make the point as to how close this circle is. But it makes it hard to care about the characters who do eventually emerge from the throng. Morgan fails to make any real new associations with other passengers and neither does the reader. Second and third class passengers, and the crew, are restricted to walk on parts. So I am not sure we really care who lives and who dies when the novel reaches its inevitable climax. In other words this was a disappointing effort, going through the motions by a novelist who at her best was very much better than this.

Every Man for Himself, by Beryl Bainbridge, 2002

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Book review

Virtually every review of Winter Garden that I’ve found online says a variation of the same thing – ‘I am not sure what was going on’! Me too I’m afraid. I had the strong impression that if I had invested more time and care in reading the novel I would have found patterns and depths that I missed. But sadly this was one of those ’20 pages a day when the opportunity arises’ reads, rather than a focussed session which probably would have finished of the just over 150 pages in an afternoon. As a result I came away feeling a bit of a failure as a reader.

For context, the novel follows Douglas Ashburner, an everyman figure if ever there was one, setting off on an adventure. He leaves his wife tucked up in bed thinking he is going on a solo fishing expedition to Scotland. In fact, and quite improbably, he is setting off for Moscow as a guest of the Soviet Artists’ Union. He is travelling (and looking forward to some extra marital sex) with Nina St Clair, an artist with whom he has been having an affair. The other two members of the party are Bernard, an uncompromising artist, and Enid, whose role on the trip is never entirely clear, or not to me anyway!

On arrival in what was still the pre-glasnost USSR, in some ways enemy territory, Ashburner’s luggage goes missing. Shortly afterwards so does Nina. The party’s interpreter and guide drives them through a series of increasingly uncoordinated and unlikely visits, some vaguely arts related, others more in the way of social visits. There’s a lot of drinking and a huge amount of ‘business’ about Douglas’s fishing rods, taken along to sustain the trip to Scotland story. The novel descends quickly into a increasingly Kafkaesque swirl of events few of which make any sense. For example one night Ashburner receives a sinister phone call:

“‘I am your brother’ shouted the voice. ‘It is Boris. Listen to me please. Tomorrow night there is an exhibition of Zamyotov’s work in the people’s Institute behind Bolotnaya Square. You will go there. I have fixed it all. Do not listen to them when they tell you something else is specified. Tell them to jump in the lake, yes? Beforehand there will be a lecture. Unfortunately I myself cannot be there until later. You will like the etchings, I think. Have you understood?’”

Is this a coded message? A wrong number? The incident is quickly forgotten as the party move on to the next stage of the tour, still without Nina, but similar incidents pile up. making it hard to follow the narrative thread. On a train to Leningrad Douglas has a disturbing sexual encounter but can’t be sure whether or not it was a dream. For no particular reason he is then taken to watch a brain operation. They go to the opera. He thinks he sees Nina several times, but each time she quickly disappears, and I soon found myself not really caring whether she finally emerged or not.

Just to give a sense of my confusion with this novel, there is a sentence in the penultimate chapter where Douglas uses an everyday phrase which reminds him of “his conversation with Tatiana’s husband in the forest”. There’s no point in being dishonest about this – not only did I not remember the conversation referred to, thereby losing any significance the comment may have had, but I also couldn’t bring to mind either Tatiana herself, or her husband. It’s conceivable that there was no Tatiana and this is just the author’s sense of a meta-joke; equally Tatiana may have been a significant figure that I just overlooked – I am certainly not going to reread to find out! The point of this anecdote is to underline how much I struggled to engage with the text in the way it needed to be read.

The novel ends with Douglas (and this reader) no closer to understanding what has happened to Nina. There is a suggestion that Bernard was using the trip as cover to sketch military bases, but this is thrown away in a sentence. The Flamingo edition I read has a quote from the Sunday Times on its back cover: “I wish it had not stopped”. So did I – I wish it had had an ending of sorts rather than just stopping!

Thematically Winter Garden could so easily have been written by Kingsley Amis, featuring as it does that stock Amis character, an unprepossessing, morose male central figure who is strangely successful with women but a bit of a failure at life. The late Soviet-era backdrop, dominated by drinking, confusion and cold weather would have been a classic Amis setting. If I had read this without knowing the author I would have staked a lot of money on it being by Amis senior.

It’s conceivable that one day I will reread it and all the missing pieces will fall into place, but for now I am happy to move on.

Winter Garden, by Beryl Bainbridge, 1980

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Book review

Beryl Bainbridge has been on my ‘must read more by this author’ list for a long time, particularly since I enjoyed her ‘An Awfully Big Adventure‘ back in 2018. It’s taken me until now to act on that resolution, and only then because I came across her Master Georgie, which was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize, in a charity shop at a bargain price.

The novel is told in six brief chapters, which Bainbridge describes as ‘plates’, introducing the photography theme which provides a structure for the novel. The opening plate/chapter is told by Myrtle, a Victorian foundling who has been taken in (and is later adopted) by the Hardy family who are from Liverpool. Any echoes of another orphan child found in Liverpool and taken in by a family (Heathcliff?) seem coincidental. Myrtle is obsessively devoted to Master Georgie, the son of the household. Set in 1846 this introductory chapter tells the events of the day of Mr Hardy senior’s ignominious death of a heart attack in a brothel, and how his body is smuggled back into the family home in a cart (previously used to present a Punch and Judy show) to try to avoid any scandal.

Four years later we next hear from Pompey Jones, an Artful Dodger-like character who having helped with the removal of Mr Hardy’s body from the brothel to his bed has become another part of the extended Hardy household. Pompey is working with Master Georgie, now the master of the household. on his experiments with amateur photography. George is now married and a surgeon. There are also hints in Pompey’s narrative that his relationship with George has a sexual component.

Another time skip takes the novel to the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854 Sevastopol. For reasons that are unclear (to me on a first read, I may have missed something by way of explanation) George having signed on as an army doctor, has been followed into the conflict by Myrtle, his brother in law Dr Potter, and their families. Pompey is also there as an assistant to a war photographer travelling in the trusty and multi-purpose Punch and Judy cart. This chapter is narrated by Dr Potter, and having checked it seems his explanation for travelling into the heart of a war-zone is that he needs to be there as an ‘observer’ which seems unconvincing at best.

The conflict gradually heats up and comes to dominate the narrative, ending in the bloody battle of Inkerman. These are the strongest scenes of the novel in which the horror of the conflict is captured in gory detail. Death, which has dominated all the sections of the book, almost overwhelms it.

One of the things that stood out from An Awfully Big Adventure was the author’s clever manipulation of point of view narration to slowly build the narrative. It’s the jigsaw building method of story-telling, where the final picture only emerges as the pieces are assembled by the different perspectives. Bainbridge uses the same technique here, although to much lesser effect. The narrators leave it to the reader to fill in many gaps in the narrative, but it is fairly easy to piece these together and work out the relationships between the characters with a little care and attention. When the final picture is assembled in An Awfully Big Adventure it is with a sense of revelation, something that is lacking here. Constructing the novel around the six photographs, one taken in each ‘plate’ was probably a clever idea, but it runs the risk of being over-pleased with the conceit without adding much to the narrative. Each chapter is a snapshot of events rather than part of a coherent narrative, and while piecing the connections between each ‘plate’ is a comfortable enough task for the reader, it didn’t feel as rewarding as I think the author may have intended.

Master Georgie is a lesser novel in other ways. Myrtle has the potential to be a central character, but her portrait is horribly one-dimensional. Apart from her slave-like devotion to Master George, to the extent of having his children and then giving them up to his wife to raise as her own, her character has no depth whatsoever. All she does is follow George around like a puppy dog. This is such a waste of a potentially interesting character – it would have been interesting to have seen her gradually come to realise that he didn’t deserve her devotion for instance, or for her to have found something to do other than hang around on the off-chance he might need her. Dr Potter is also problematic (although to a lesser extent). The amateur Victorian geologist is something of a cliché in the first place, but his role in the novel is unclear other than to provide a contrasting voice to the other narrators. Why does he follow George to war? I understand there was an element of war tourism in the Crimea, but Potter isn’t there for that. For the initial stage of the journey he is accompanied by his wife and children, as is George, even though it is clear that a serious conflict is brewing. It just makes no sense why they would all recklessly head off to the Crimea in the way they do. George seeks out the conflict because he believes he can help as a doctor, and possibly as some form of redemption for previous weaknesses or to prove himself (the novel’s title infantilises him, suggesting he needs to do some growing up), but the presence of the others is inexplicable.

Master Georgie has the beginnings of a great novel about the Crimean War, using that conflict to reflect on Victorian society, class and personal relationships. The structure of the novel, based around the six photographs, is cleverly designed. There are glimpses of what might have been, but only glimpses. It had an incomplete or draft feel to it. I have no issue with the reader being asked to do the heavy-lifting and sketch in the missing details of relationships between characters, for example, but here even when that work is done we are left with a picture with too many missing pieces.

Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge, 1998

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