‘Injury Time’ by Beryl Bainbridge    (1977) – 203 pages

‘Injury Time’ starts out sanely enough. Edward is a married tax accountant. Binny is a hapless divorcee with three children. Edward and Binny are having an affair. It is the 1970s after all.

Edward feels guilty about Binny.

“He gave her so little; he denied her the simple pleasures a wife took for granted – that business of cooking his meals, remembering his sister’s birthday, putting intricate little bundles of socks into his drawer.’”

Binny wonders why Edward couldn’t “pretend that he longed to leave his wife, so that she in return could pretend she wished he would.”

In order for Binny to feel more involved with his life, Edward decides to arrange a dinner party at Binny’s house with his friend Simpson and Simpson’s wife Muriel. Edward must get home by 11:00 PM so his wife does not get suspicious.

So Simpson and his wife arrive that evening at Binny’s house for the dinner party.

“As for Simpson, he was just another Edward – too pompous for words. Men were all alike. It was not being involved with children every hour of the day that made them appear to be superior.”

And then everything goes crazy.

First Binny’s woman friend Alma shows up…drunk, and Alma proceeds to vomit all over the floor and pass out.

Then some even more unexpected guests arrive, bank robbers with sawed-off shotguns. ‘Injury Time’ turns from a social comedy of middle-aged passion into a surreal comedic hostage drama with a baby carriage full of cash. When all hell breaks loose, Edward is still worried about getting home to his wife in time.

‘Injury Time’ captures that wildest of times, the 1970s, when things between men and women seemed to go to ridiculous extremes. I do think that Beryl Bainbridge could have better prepared us early on for the unhinged conclusion. However I admire Bainbridge’s willingness to go the dark comedy route rather than settling for a straightforward story.

Grade:   B+

‘The Dressmaker’ by Beryl Bainbridge     (1973) – 183 pages

“Bainbridge has no truck with counting your blessings or happy endings or spelling out the psychology of her disparate characters. She writes as she sees life (I think) – she knows that our struggles and hopes make comic figures of us all and sometimes, quite often, turn us nasty. I have never heard Bainbridge be pompous; I have never heard her suggest that she has ever got life right, or, indeed, that there is a right way.” – Mavis Cheek, The Guardian

I didn’t miss much in my early days of fiction reading, but I surely neglected a great fiction writer in Beryl Bainbridge. I am making up for my mistake now, and the down-to-earth novels of Beryl Bainbridge are one of my major reading pleasures today.

‘The Dressmaker’ was the first of five of her novels to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It captures perfectly the ambiance of English working class life during World War II in Liverpool, including “the spam fritters cooking on the stove”. The two aunts Nellie and Margo have brought up their niece Rita since she was not yet five when her mother died. Rita’s father Jack, who is a butcher and is Nellie and Margo’s brother, visits them often. Now Rita is 17.

A German bomb blast in the neighborhood had killed 12 people and “cracked the little mirror bordered in green velvet with the red roses painted on the glass” in their living room. Now young United States soldiers are flooding into Liverpool, and they are of much interest to the young women including Rita. When Rita attends an engagement party for a neighbor girl and her US beau, Rita meets her own young US soldier Ira. Aunt Nellie invites Ira to dinner to determine if his attentions with Rita are good or bad.

Not all of the Liverpudlians welcomed the US soldiers. Jack says,

“There’s only three things wrong with them Yanks. They’re overpaid, oversexed, and over here.”

This is a Gothic horror novel, but I had a smile on my face the entire time I was reading it. Each of the characters is flaky in his or her own way. Much of the fun stems from that.

Nellie is the dressmaker, “and it was her instrument, the black Singer with the hand-painted flowers.” Nellie is practical minded, but she does have her rages.

“At this she made a funny little gesture of contempt with her elbows, flapping them like a hen rising from its perch in alarm.”

Margo, who works in a munitions plant, is flighty.

.

“Margo was a follower. She’d do what anyone wanted, provided it was silly enough. Her intentions were good, but she lacked tenacity. She was the big blaze that died down through lack of fuel.”

And the niece Rita is in love with her Yank soldier.

“Every time he spoke to her, color flooded her cheeks. She wondered how anyone survived being in love, let alone get married – condemned to live forever in this state of quivering anxiety…”

Later, this story which starts out as a deadpan English working-class comedy of manners takes a very wicked turn indeed.

Grade:   A

‘Sweet William’ by Beryl Bainbridge  (1975) – 204 pages

‘Sweet William’ captures the ambiance – the permissive atmosphere and the sexual politics – of the early 1970s. Ann is a young woman who has had relationships with a few men, even a short go with a married man. Now she is engaged to Gerald. However nothing has prepared her for her encounter with William.

Despite being engaged to Gerald who has headed off on a trip to the United States, she is swept off her feet by the insufferable playwright William.

“You don’t want to expect normality from him. He’s an artist after all.”

He says the most beautiful things. He is an elemental charmer, and soon she winds up in bed with William.

“There were no preliminaries. Nor did he take any precautions.”

Only later does she discover that he has been divorced and has kids. Only later does she discover that he has also remarried and thus has another wife now. Only later does she discover that he has started something going with her younger female cousin Pamela. Only later does she discover that she is pregnant.

“She had been happier when he indicated love, not practiced it.”

But Ann still figures she can work things out with William. She loves him.

“Oh he was terribly sincere. At least that first week.”

Ann’s mother Mrs. Walton takes a differing view of things. Her mother got married to a British officer shortly after he returned from World War II.

“You talk about modern life and things being different now. You haven’t learned anything at all. All this permissiveness has led you young girls into slavery.”

Things are definitely different for Ann in the 1970s from her mother’s World War II times. Her mother and her aunt preferred the company of women and to “leave the nasty men alone with their brutish ways and their engorged appendages”.

“It was very difficult for her under the circumstances. All those years of duty and conformity gone for nothing. Of no value. Twenty years later the old standards swept away as if they had never been.”

In our time more than forty years later, Sweet William would be accused of serial sexual harassment which doesn’t sound so sweet.

It is difficult to comprehend that we are now farther distant from the 1970s than those people in the 1970s were distant from the time of World War II.

Grade:    B+

‘The Bottle Factory Outing’ by Beryl Bainbridge    (1974)  –  219 pages

So much of literature today seems designed to placate everyone who reads it. ‘The Bottle Factory Outing’ will placate no one; it is uncompromising in its starkness and its gallows humor. It’s sheer originality is amazing; I doubt that there would be anyone else who could write a novel quite like ‘The Bottle Factory Outing’.

It is the story of two women, Freda and Brenda, who room together and work together in the same wine bottle factory in London. I picture the two women as both in their late twenties or early thirties. Freda is big, blonde, and aggressive while Brenda is more hapless and self-effacing, yet it is Brenda who was previously married.

They are the only women who work in the bottle factory besides an older Italian woman Maria. The factory is owned by Paganotti, an Italian entrepreneur transplanted to England, and most of the other employees are Italian men. Freda has her eyes and her heart set on fellow worker Vittorio.

“It’s not so much that I want him, she thought, but I would like him to want me.”

Beryl Bainbridge

Meanwhile Brenda is beset by the unwanted fumbling attentions of the plant manager Rossi or what we would call sexual harassment today.

“She couldn’t think how to discourage him – she didn’t want to lose her job and she hated giving offense. He had a funny way of pinching her all over, as if she was a mattress whose stuffing needed distributing more evenly.”

The novel centers around a Sunday outing for the workers in the bottling plant. I won’t go into any of the details of the shocking plot so that you can discover it for yourself.

‘The Bottle Factory Outing’ is a deadpan comedy like nothing you have ever read before. Somehow Beryl Bainbridge manages to keep a straight face while telling us this outrageous story.

Grade:    A