This month we’ll be reading Beryl Bainbridge’s novel The Bottle Factory Outing, which won our public vote by a significant margin.
This work comes from the first successful part of the writer’s career when she specialised in “deftly distorted biography”, as AN Wilson put it. It’s partly inspired by a period in 1970 when Bainbridge and a friend worked in Belloni’s wine warehouse in London. This was a pretty miserable job, sticking labels on to bottles in conditions so cold that the writer claimed she tried to keep warm by wrapping herself up in newspaper. It wasn’t well paid either – although it came with the dubious perk of an unlimited wine allowance. Bainbridge would later claim she often had to be wheeled home by 3pm. Or sometimes even 10.30am.
You can see her talking about it in this charming clip from the 1976 BBC Books programme. The clip also contains some footage from her publisher Duckworth, during its eccentric pomp, when Bainbridge appears to have had a writing desk inside the office. She also claims to have mainly written the book between the hours of 11pm and 5am.
And if that isn’t intriguing enough, how about some of the praise it received when it came out? Writing in the Sunday Times, the respected critic Ronald Blythe blew his entire annual adjective allowance in one glorious paragraph:
“After turning the final page of The Bottle Factory Outing one can only gasp, and grope for the right phrase. What a talent, if that is not too mild a word. Such an atmosphere of impending doom has not been created since Brighton Rock – except that Beryl Bainbridge is mercilessly comic instead of mercilessly vicious. Specialising in successive denouements, and with her gift for collecting the most amazing detail, she is so in control of her marvellous little story that one hangs on her words from first to last. What originality, what pleasure.”
The author of the aforementioned Brighton Rock was also impressed. Graham Greene called The Bottle Factory Outing “an outrageously funny and horrifying novel” in the Observer.
High praise. She was also shortlisted for the Booker, and, as usual, didn’t win. But she did receive the considerable kudos and a handy 200 guineas from the Guardian fiction prize.
Speaking for myself, I haven’t read the book yet, and am looking forward to doing so. I hope you’ll join me.
As an extra inducement, we have five copies to give away to the first five readers from the UK to post “I want a copy please”, along with a nice, constructive comment in the comments section below. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to comment, email Laura Kemp with your address (laura.kemp@theguardian.com). Be nice to her, too. And as usual, all suggestions and ideas for future discussions will be gratefully received.
In the meantime, all extra suggestions, ideas for discussion and early impressions of the book as you read through are very welcome, so please post your thoughts below.
