The film critic Mark Kermode often talks about the moment when he realises he’s in safe hands at a screening, and comes to understand that the film he’s about to review is going to be fantastic, and that he can sit back, relax and begin to enjoy himself. That moment frequently comes within the first 10 seconds, he says. And it’s a great feeling. Having just read The Bottle Factory Outing, I know exactly what he means.
Here’s the opening:
The hearse stood outside the block of flats waiting for the old lady. Freda was crying. There were some children and a dog running in and out of the line of bare black trees planted in the pavement.
You could be forgiven for thinking that those short, visual, declarative sentences are straightforward. For a couple of beats, I didn’t make all that much of them. Then came the jolt. The fact that it was a hearse that was waiting for “the old lady” meant that said aged being was, in fact, a corpse. And while I was chewing on that, there came the next line: ‘“I don’t know why you’re crying,” said Brenda. “You didn’t know her.”’
Everything went just a little off kilter. The perfectly natural act of crying at a funeral became strange. Not very strange. But odd enough. Especially when combined with Brenda’s entirely unsympathetic response to Freda’s distress.
It isn’t the most striking beginning to a novel. It won’t ever be anthologised alongside Orwell’s clocks striking 13, or Anthony Burgess’ catamite and archbishop. But the fact that it is unshowy doesn’t mean it isn’t impressive writing. That assured understatement is a sign of an author in control. And an author who is going to mess you around in most delightful and unsettling ways.
The Bottle Factory Outing more than delivers on that initial promise. Its sentences remain so masterfully restrained that you barely notice the barb until you’ve taken a few steps on – and find yourself hooked back.
I think I may have gasped when I finally caught up on the implications of the following statement about Freda and Brenda’s sharing a sleeping space in their dingy bedsit:
Brenda had fashioned a bolster to put down the middle of the bed and a row of books to ensure that they lay less intimately at night. Freda complained that the books were uncomfortable – but then she had never been married.
After the surprise came a chuckle. It’s funny to think that a husband could be so much less comfortable as a sleeping companion than a row of books. But after the laughter, came a shiver. What kind of a marriage must Brenda have endured?
Some inkling of those horrors comes when Brenda’s mother-in-law arrives and tries to shoot her with an air pistol. Prompting another moment of unsettling brilliance, as we look on the aftermath:
“We ought to make a cup of tea,” said Brenda, looking at Stanley’s mother. “She’s had a shock.”
Mrs Haddon stared back without pity. “I was aiming at your vocal chords. You always talked too much.”
Ouch. And the worst thing is that by this stage in the novel we know something of Brenda. I actually found myself questioning whether she does talk too much. And so found myself wondering whether an entirely unreasonable statement had any kind of justification. And so again, after the laughter there had come a stomach lurch. It’s all similarly queasy and unsettling. It’s tremendous artistry. It’s a novel with a uniquely woozy feel – a jelly-legged sense of uncertainty – that feels all the stranger because the sentences appear so superficially straightforward.
It is, in short, superb prose. There are perhaps few sentences that stand out as individual gems. But there are also few writers who offer more control and delight line-by-line.
And the best thing is that Bainbridge offers the same pleasures (and nasty surprises) on a chapter-by-chapter level too. Just as I found myself reading and re-reading and doubting the meaning of individual sentences, so later events in the novel threw everything in the early stages into confusion. Hilarious passages about Brenda’s weak character, or the factory overseer Rossi’s wandering hands, take on sinister new implications following the gloriously ugly denouement.
Yet even a master like Bainbridge can not have planned or foreseen one of the other disturbing double-takes the novel provokes. The Bottle Factory Outing is a curious book to read so soon after the UK’s EU referendum. It is set in England just before it joined the EEC and it is a drab, grey, poor world of rancid bedsits, where olives are exotic and hard to find and Italians an almost entirely unknown quantity:
Patiently Freda explained that it wasn’t a bottle factory, it was a wine factory – that they would be working alongside simple peasants who had culture and tradition behind them. Brenda hinted that she didn’t like foreigners – she found them difficult to get on with. Freda said it proved how puny a person she was in mind and body.
Passages like that also gave me another kind of stomach lurch. Is that the country that everyone wanted back? It made me feel like this book also has an urgent political message – even if none was originally intended. It is a book everyone should read, not just because it is a wonderful work of art in itself, but because it says so much about our world. And it’s all the more impressive that it does so in so few pages (my edition is 179 pages long), in such short sentences, and with so many brilliant jokes. Beryl Bainbridge – what a writer! Remind me again why she never won the Booker …
