Where to start with Beryl Bainbridge: a guide to her best books

Beryl Bainbridge was rarely found without a cigarette in one hand and a glass of whisky in the other, and famously declared she didn’t really see the point of eating since it blunted the effects of alcohol. Fellow Booker-nominated Liverpudlian Linda Grant first encountered Bainbridge in the flesh on a day organised for library members to meet authors in Essex in 2002. At the lunch for which, Grant later recalled, ‘Beryl ate a few salad leaves and drank a third of a bottle of Scotch, which did not appear to impair her in any way.’ Grant knew, without a doubt, that she was ‘in the presence of greatness’.  

Born in Liverpool in 1932, Bainbridge returned again and again to the landscape, emotions, people and experiences of her childhood, though not in an obviously autobiographical vein. Instead, she mixed fact and fiction to potent effect, never losing sight of the importance of telling a good story.  

She spent most of her adult life in Camden Town in London, in a house crammed with Victoriana – piles of religious iconography, a life-sized mannequin of Neville Chamberlain, and plenty of taxidermy, including a stuffed water buffalo she named Eric. This only added to her reputation as an eccentric, but as her friend Paul Bailey told the Guardian after her death in 2010, at the age of 77, she was someone who simply ‘refused to believe that life is ordinary, and her books reflected that belief’.

If you want to see where it all began – Filthy Lucre (1986)

Despite her early experiences on the stage, writing was always where Bainbridge’s true creativity lay. In an interview with the Paris Review published when she was 68, she said that she’d known that she’d wanted to be a writer since she was eight years old, and indeed, she wrote her first novel, Filthy Lucre, not three years later, when she was only 11. From the foggy streets of Victorian London to the plantations of Virginia, it’s a tale of lost inheritances, the Chinese Opium Wars, and adventures on the high seas. Think Oliver Twist-meets-Treasure Island, to name two references from Bainbridge’s childhood bookshelves.  

Published in 1986, four decades after it was written, it appeared as something of a novelty, offering up an endearing portrait of a now established writer as a young girl. But as the Sunday Telegraph’s critic pointed out, ‘If this novel is to set a fashion for authors to rummage in their trunks for early works, they had better beware: Beryl Bainbridge has set a very high standard.’ Adding to its charms are the black and white drawings that the author produced to illustrate the text. Also a talented artist, Bainbridge painted and drew throughout her life, preferring to produce images that told some kind of narrative. ‘I like making things,’ she told Michael Parkinson when he interviewed her on Desert Island Discs in 1986 – novels, pictures, models, stories. As a rule, after she’d finished writing each of her novels, she’d paint a picture from it.  

If you like thrillers – Harriet Said (1972)

Although published as her third novel, Harriet Said… (1972) is technically Bainbridge’s debut, written back in 1961. She sent it to various publishers at the time, but it was roundly rejected. ‘What repulsive little creatures you have made the central characters, repulsive beyond belief!’ she later recalled one telling her. These ‘repulsive creatures’ are two Merseyside schoolgirls, whom, we know from the opening page, have been involved in something terrible. What exactly happened, and whether they’re the victims or the perpetrators, are the questions the novel then sets out to answer.  

The germ of the idea for this shocking tale of adolescent transgression originated in newspaper reports Bainbridge had read about New Zealand’s real-life Parker-Hulme case (which also inspired Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures, starring Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey). ‘Pinching’ good plots from news stories was something she admitted to doing often. She’d then fill in the rest from her own life, basing her characters on people she knew, or drawing on her own experiences when it came to more minor events in the story.  

Her own childhood was of endless fascination to her. ‘All I ever wanted to do was to make sense of what had happened to me,’ she expounded during her Desert Island Discs appearance, explaining that she used her fiction to ‘exorcise’ the ‘dark strains’ of her early years – in particular the turbulent relationship between her parents, between whom she often acted as a referee. This marks her writing out as different to that of many of her peers during this era. As she told the Paris Review: ‘When I started writing in the 1960s, wasn’t it the time when women were beginning to write about girls having abortions and single mothers living in Hampstead and having a dreadful time? Well, I thought, I’m not going to do that; I’m not bothering with all that rubbish.’  

If you want something topical – Young Adolf (1978)

What if, in 1912, a young Adolf Hitler, then in his early 20s, went to stay with his half-brother and his wife who were living in Liverpool? This is the premise of Young Adolf (1978), Bainbridge’s first foray into the realm of historical fiction. 

Bainbridge’s Adolf is a good-for-nothing layabout, a failed art student without a job – and no interest in getting one – who is paranoid about being pursued for evading military service back in Austria. He’s prone to tantrums and tempers, and likes to rant about the contamination of Europe by impure blood lines. In the context of the book, everything that comes out of the pipsqueak’s mouth deserves laughter, but the weight of history sends a shiver down the reader’s spine. 

Thoroughly traumatised by his time in Liverpool, Adolf heads home nursing grudges and plotting revenge. Nevertheless, the plot resembles that of a screwball comedy. As the Observer rightly surmised, only Bainbridge could have the chutzpah to merge ‘high farce’ and ‘prophetic ironies’, not to mention the talent to pull it off. 

If you want to read the one that should have won the Booker – Master Georgie (1998)

Speaking after Bainbridge’s death, Ion Trewin told the Guardian that she was ‘the greatest novelist of her generation who didn’t win the Man Booker Prize, and quite undeservedly so’. This might seem like quite a statement for the then literary director of the Booker to make, but Bainbridge had been shortlisted five times and never triumphed. In order to remedy this, in 2011 the Booker Prize Foundation organised a special ‘Best of Beryl’ prize in which they asked the public to vote for their favourite of her Booker-nominated works, finally elevating Bainbridge from ‘Booker bridesmaid’ to bride.  

The winner was Master Georgie (1998), which recounts the adventures of George Hardy, a surgeon and photographer. The first half of the novel unfolds in 19th-century Liverpool, and treats us to our hero’s back story – including how Myrtle, a young servant girl who works for George’s family, becomes much more to him than hired help; and how she and he make the acquaintance of one Pompey Jones, another central character in the story. In the book’s second half, George (and his extended family) decamps to Constantinople, hoping to put his surgeon’s skills to good use in the Crimean War. 

Characteristically, Bainbridge doesn’t shy away from the horrors of the battlefield, both physical and psychological, and by the end, it’s a sobering portrait of the grim realities of war. Interesting though, despite the period context, at its core this is a novel about one peculiar family and their own peculiar domestic set-up, and in that it perhaps has more in common with its author’s early novels, such as The Dressmaker (1973) and A Quiet Life (1976), than her then more recent historically-set offerings.  

If this has piqued your interest in the woman behind the writing – Something Happened Yesterday (1993)

‘What is more peculiar, more riveting, devious and horrific than real life?’ Bainbridge once asked. From her relationship, age 15, with a German POW, to the time her mother-in-law tried to shoot her (with a real gun – Bainbridge proudly left the bullet holes as evidence in the hallway of her home), her life really was as bizarre as anything she described in her novels, and vice versa. 

So, for a taste of Bainbridge’s reality without a fictional veneer, read Something Happened Yesterday (1993), a collection of short, personal essay-style columns originally published in the Evening Standard (again, with added illustrations by the author). Full of self-deprecating wit and entertaining anecdote, they were aptly described by one critic as being ‘as salty and addictive as a bag of crisps’ – one of the few foodstuffs one can imagine Bainbridge herself actually consuming; a good pairing with the whisky and fags.