All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

by Malcolm Bradbury

'Malcolm Bradbury is a satirist of great assurance and accomplishment' Observer

Genres: British Literature

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury CBE was an English author and academic. He is best known to a wider public as a novelist. Although he is often compared with David Lodge, his friend and a contemporary as a British exponent of the campus novel genre, Bradbury's books are consistently darker in mood and less playful both in style and language. His best known novel The History Man, published in 1975, is a dark satire of academic life in the "glass and steel" universities—the then-fashionable newer universities of England that had followed their "redbrick" predecessors—which in 1981 was made into a successful BBC television serial. The protagonist is the hypocritical Howard Kirk, a sociology professor at the fictional University of Watermouth.

He completed his PhD in American studies at the University of Manchester in 1962, moving to the University of East Anglia (his second novel, Stepping Westward, appeared in 1965), where he became Professor of American Studies in 1970 and launched the world-renowned MA in Creative Writing course, which Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro both attended. He published Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel in 1973, The History Man in 1975, Who Do You Think You Are? in 1976, Rates of Exchange in 1983, Cuts: A Very Short Novel in 1987, retiring from academic life in 1995. Malcolm Bradbury became a Commander of the British Empire in 1991 for services to Literature, and was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours 2000, again for services to Literature.

Bradbury was a productive academic writer as well as a successful teacher; an expert on the modern novel, he published books on Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow and E. M. Forster, as well as editions of such modern classics as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and a number of surveys and handbooks of modern fiction, both British and American.

He also wrote extensively for television, including scripting series such as Anything More Would Be Greedy, The Gravy Train, the sequel The Gravy Train Goes East (which explored life in Bradbury's fictional Slaka), and adapting novels such as Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape and Porterhouse Blue, Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends and Kingsley Amis's The Green Man. His last television script was for Dalziel and Pascoe series 5, produced by Andy Rowley. The episode 'Foreign Bodies' was screened on BBC One on July 15, 2000.

Reviews

[Whistler's Mom · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is well-written, intelligent, and perceptive, but don't expect non-stop belly laughs.

I hate it when all a reviewer can come up with is a weak, whiny "It just wasn't what I expected" but this book wasn't what I expected and I think I have some justification for being disappointed. It's billed as "humor" and there is humor, but that's only a small component.

I think the biggest problem is that it's a cut-and-paste job, composed of two books that were combined. While the two books technically concern the same subject - the author's observations of post-WWII England - each is written from a different viewpoint. Bradbury was a wonderful writer and a very persuasive guy. So he convinces you of one thing and then (in the second half of the book) switches to the other side. Unless you ENJOY confusion, it doesn't add up to a satisfactory reading experience.

The author was a bright lad who moved up in the world by going to college Not Cambridge or Oxford. He wasn't that bright and his family had no money. He was a product of what the English Upper Crust sneeringly refers to as a "red brick" university. He was clever enough to realize that Americans have great respect for an English accent and no idea of what class the speaker represents. And so he hied himself off to the American Mid-West to accept a position as an English professor.

When he returned to England, the contrast between the energetic, forward-thinking Americans and the timid, backward-looking English struck him forcibly and he wrote a book, which was published in 1960. In this book, he accuses the English of being "phogeys" - a catch-all description of someone who is both a fogey and a phoney. The English (his argument runs) were fogeys because they refused to entertain the idea that anything new could possibly be an improvement. They were phoneys because the world-order for which their mind-set was suited (i.e. the Lost Empire) no longer existed. He discusses the various types of phogeys of different genders, ages, and classes and it's witty and entertaining, although each section goes on a bit too long.

When you get to the second half of the book (which was published in 1962) he reverses course and roundly condemns modern life and it's plastic, second-rate ambitions and extols traditional English life, where quality and common sense ruled supreme. It's as well-written and perceptive as the first half of the book, but not as entertaining and nowhere near as funny.

This is not really a humor book, but a sociology book. Or you could call it amateur sociological observation. Which is ironic, because the author (in both halves of the book) repeatedly expresses his contempt for sociologists and their field. But he does the same thing, only without pie charts and graphs and statistics.

He also makes cutting remarks about the inane English custom of recognizing achievement with knighthoods and about the pathetic men who covet those absurd "honors." And yet he accepted a knighthood for his contributions to literature in 2000 and died the same year. RIP Sir Malcolm. You should have trusted your instincts.

I love wry English humor, but this book disappointed me. There are some great parts, but there's too much filler. Unless you're very patient, I can't really recommend it. On the other hand, if you want to read one intelligent man's observations about life on both sides of the Pond in the decade-and-a-half after the end of WWII, you might find it interesting.

[Priscilla · Rating 4 out of 5]

The lament is heartfelt but looking back to the changes observed in society 60 years later doesn't shed much light on where we are today. Like it or not (and lots of it I don't like), we are where we are because a lot of people disagreed with Bradbury's view and rushed to the new economy. He died in 2000 and I wonder what he'd make of the last 20 years. There are some eerily prescient observations embedded in the book as you read it in 2020. But did it make me long for those days? As a woman, no. The world the envisions was run by a white patriarchy and with all the cheap ind thoughtless changes, damage to the earth and fraying of political systems, I still maintain that there are some things that have changed for the better, far better.