Sad, sad news for fiction lovers: the great Beryl Bainbridge, whose work put her among the top flight of post-war British novelists, died this morning.
She's best known, on balance, for her fictionalising of historical catastophes (the sinking of the Titanic in Every Man for Himself; Captain Scott's ill-starred Antarctic expedition in The Birthday Boys; the Crimean war in Master Georgie) but the first of her novels that I read – and the one that's still my favourite – is An Awfully Big Adventure. In it, she drew on her experiences as an actor in repertory theatre to tell a tale of thwarted ambition and strategic sex, amid dusty stage flats and dustier streets in a pinched 1950s Liverpool. The novel's comedy – and there's plenty of it – is offset by one of the most jerkingly tragic endings I've encountered. I loved the book so much that when a friend wrote a monologue on a life in 20th-century theatre, I gave him a copy by way of congratulations. Thankfully, he fell for it as hard as I did.
The wonderful thing about Bainbridge – one of the many wonderful things, alongside her redoubtableness, her bugger-it attitude to fags and fry-ups, her mordant wit – was that the breadth of her work was such that everyone I've asked since the news of her death has named a different book as their favourite. Please tell us which is yours, or leave your tributes below.
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