Protected: Her Drama Is Tolerable When It’s Performed Onstage

I can’t recall when it was that I first read Beryl Bainbridge. Growing up in the UK, she was always there—on the bookshelves alongside Muriel Spark, Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner, and any number of other literary grande dames—a writer known for her macabre, fearless, hugely entertaining, extremely funny, and deliciously clipped novels. Imagine my surprise then when I learned her name doesn’t quite elicit the same recognition in the US. My bewilderment soon turned to glee as I and my colleagues realized the golden opportunity this presented. An Awfully Big Adventure is just the first of Bainbridge’s works that we’re reissuing at McNally Editions, and it’s the perfect introduction to this writer who in the course of her four-decade career published 17 novels, five of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

When she was 16, Bainbridge joined the repertory theater in her hometown of Liverpool. She was initially hired as an assistant stage manager, before unexpectedly finding herself the stand-in for a young male actor who’d met with an accident, or so she claimed when regaling the tale of her lucky break in later years . . . I’m hardly the first to point out that Bainbridge was notorious for never letting the facts get in the way of telling a good story. Much of her own life—her experiences, the people who were dear to her, and places she knew well—made its way into the pages of her fiction, but she was never constrained by any sense of fidelity to the absolute truth. Alas, her promising early career on the stage didn’t last. She moved to London in the early 1960s and turned to writing instead—thankfully!—but her experiences were all grist for the mill, and she drew on them heavily when she wrote An Awfully Big Adventure in 1989.

Having sprinkled a liberal measure of make-believe over her memories, the novel is an adults-only tale of calamity, happenstance and buried secrets, as seen (or not seen) through the eyes of Bainbridge’s fictional alter ego, 15-year-old Stella Bradshaw, who lives with her Uncle Vernon and Aunt Lily in Liverpool. It’s the 1950s, so this is a grey, pre-Beatles city, pockmarked with bomb damage from the Second World War, where central heating is an as yet unexperienced luxury, and taking a hot bath is a huge palaver. Kindly but vexing Uncle Vernon’s long dreamt of a life on the stage for his niece, so he’s over the moon when she gets a job with the local rep. Stella herself, meanwhile, isn’t anywhere near as starry-eyed. Instead, she stumbles around among the broken hearts, promises, and dreams that plague this motley company of third-rate thespians as they prepare for their seasonal performance of Peter Pan, more often than not putting her foot in it, not getting the joke, or misreading the room. There’s much hilarity in her fumblings, but there’s a terrible poignancy to her vulnerability too. An Awfully Big Adventure showcases Bainbridge at her blackly comic yet touching best.

– Lucy Scholes
Senior Editor, McNally Editions