An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge (July 27)

[Susan]

Welcome to our July 27 buddy read of An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge First published in 1989 the novel is the first Bainbridge I read.



Shortlisted for the 1990 Booker Prize, and with a new introduction by Yiyun Li (in the recently released new edition), a darkly comic novel of class, the long shadow of war, and unrequited first love.

Liverpool, 1950. Sixteen-year-old Stella is hired as assistant stage manager by a repertory theatre company and soon falls into a heady infatuation with the director, Meredith – failing to notice how he shows not only no interest in her, but in any woman. When the celebrated actor O'Hara arrives to take the lead in their production of Peter Pan, it sets in motion a drama offstage of lost inno­cence, tragedy and miscommunication.

Peopled by a cast of eccentric characters and the air thick with the scent of greasepaint and cigarettes, An Awfully Big Adventure is an evocative and sharp-edged novel for fans of Penelope Fitzgerald, Muriel Spark and Camilla Grudova.

The Guardian lists it as her fifth best novel: 5 An Awfully Big Adventure (1989)

Set, like many of Bainbridge’s novels, in post-war Liverpool, this book brings us an ungovernable girl, Stella, and her efforts to become an actor. (Bainbridge acted before she wrote, and appeared in the eighth episode of Coronation Street in 1961.) She falls for the director, Meredith Potter, with his “Gestapo monocle”, as he prepares a production of Peter Pan. This is Bainbridge at her most demanding – “I don’t like to be obvious or spell things out” – and the reader must stay alert, but the rewards are rich.

Sample line: “[Meredith] had never known a father, being the issue of a man who smoked cigars and a girl plucked from the typing pool of the Cunard buildings in 1913.”

Please come and join the discussion July 27.