Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stewart

Douglas Stewart won the Booker Prize for Fiction with Shuggie Bain, an autobiographical novel about a child coping with an alcoholic parent. Shuggie is a wee lad - the novel is set largely in Glasgow - who becomes noted for his la-di-dah speech and his apparent desire to be different. Agnes, his mother, is an alcoholic. She does not try to hide the fact. Anything will do, but cans of Special Brew figure large and often. She earns whatever she can in whatever way she can to fund her habit and pools the family’s benefits to the cause. She obviously does not seek employment, because she could never be sufficiently dependable to be relied upon. And she knows it.

Shuggie and his much older brother Leek often go hungry. They are often cold, not only because there is usually not a fifty pence piece to feed the meter, but also because what was put into the meter has been recycled to buy more booze. The television often does not work either, because it’s a pay-slot type and it too has been emptied. The mother Agnes has a relationship with Shuggie’s father, who happens to be called Shug. She has another relationship with Eugene. Both men are taxi drivers, and both have increased in girth after years of sedentary labor. The action, if that be the right word, takes place in Glasgow and then in Pithead, a rundown and already depressed mining community, if that be a relevant label for the place described. It is in these two working-class communities that Shuggie and his brother grow up, mature before their years and cope, for that is the best thing they can achieve with so much stacked against them.

Shuggie Bain is a story of survival. It is, in its own way, a story of dignity and human perseverance in the face of adversity. It is, however, very one-dimensional. I persevered with the book more out of duty, more out of a desire to support it than a true interest in what might happen to his characters. Well before the end, I was not only rather tired of repeating the same scenario, but I had also lost interest in the outcomes. Perhaps that was the point. If so, it became laboured.

There is always a dilemma for a writer when characters speak in dialect or with an accent. How much of the sound of the speech should be written? Is it wise to change the spelling of common words to indicate a different pronunciation from standard English? A problem with much nineteenth century fiction is that the middle classes seem to talk proper, but as soon as the working-class character appears, then the apostrophes suddenly appear to obliterate all the aitches. Personally, I prefer writers not to write in accents. The problem is that often it doesn’t work. In Yorkshire, one might ask, “Wots tha doin’ wi’ thy pen?” and the answer might be “Raaatin”. I come from a place where the word bus is pronounced bus, not bas or even bis. With an upper-class character, would I ever write “Air hair lair, Ha-aa-yo?” “Em fen, thiyank yo.” to indicate privilege, except when I might want to humiliate them and their class?

In Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart chooses to write much of the quoted speech in a version of Glaswegian dialect, complete with alternative spellings to indicate the uniqueness of the sound. It does not work. It renders these characters sometimes unintelligible, sometimes comic. An example will illustrate. Precisely why “fitba” should be used instead of football, I have no idea. Would a novel set in London use a line like “Wew, vez an awfuw lo’ o’ wewwintns in vat sho”? Perhaps not, even if it were a gumboot shop.

I was genuinely willing the book to succeed. And it did, in its own way. It is worth reading and the progression of the characters does become interesting, if never truly engaging. Maybe that is its point. But there always seems to be a lot of wood to clear to get to the trees.

Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse

 

Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse provided the latest foray into the world and mores of the late fifties. It’s yet another novel that resides firmly in northern English working class life. But unlike Alan Sillitoe, John Braine or Stan Bairstow, Billy Liar lives almost entirely in the comic. Until, that is, when it doesn’t.

A problem with nostalgia is that it tends to induce blindness. Shortcomings and limitations disappear when the warm glow of familiarity obscures everything but the positive. Perhaps I became infected with this unmentionable N word when I decided to re-read this book that I doubt I have touched in over fifty years. This may indeed be strange, because Stradhoughton, the fictional Yorkshire backwater where the novel is set could in reality have been close to where I was raised and indeed the city of my birth, Wakefield, is mentioned several times, where it might even be understood to be at some height of cosmopolitan sophistication. Perhaps not…

I had expected Billy Liar to have aged, perhaps grown stale now that its setting would no longer be ideologically either working class or Labour voting. But has anything changed? And if so, has it been for the better?  Might it be that the community in which Billy lived had convinced itself of its status and indispensability only to have come down to earth with a bump when reality intervened?

Billy Liar is a short book. Joyce’s Ulysses is longer. But they both inhabit similar territory in that they follow a principal character through one day’s eventless events. Viewed in this light, Billy Liar becomes potentially much more than a comic romp through northern English quaintness.

Billy is an employee in an undertaker. He spends the first part of his Saturday morning at work, as everyone did in that era. He strolls around town, goes to the pub, meets a girlfriend or two and then comes down to earth. It’s a special day for Billy because he’s convinced himself that he is about to enter the big time as a comedy writer for a name in London. From start to finish, however, Billy is deluding himself.

He and a workmate converse in what sounds like a double act. It’s supposed to be funny – and is. But before long, we are laughing at the two of them, not with them. It’s not original. Billy’s talent, it seems like that of everyone else, is mimicry., a cliched copying of what the mass media are feeding him.

Though he does tell fibs to all, the person he is really lying to is himself., since he has never stepped back from his surroundings to reflect how narrow and confined is his reality. He is not alone. Bad jokes are repeated. Multiple girlfriends believe they too are unique in his life. He is engaged to two of them – or so he thinks. Perhaps they do too.

After fifty years of separation, Billy Liar now seems more significant that it did first time round. Billy is convinced he is about to break out of his small-town straitjacket. He is convinced he is something special because he can mimic the received messages with which he has been fed. His self-delusion seems complete. He thus now becomes a metaphor for the continued subservience and indeed marginalisation of the way of life he represents. It’s comic, but in the end it’s a tragedy.

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe

“Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can’t help being one. You can’t deny that. And it’s best to be a rebel so as to show ‘em it don’t pay to do you down. Factories and labor exchanges and insurance officers keep us alive and kicking – so they say -but they’re booby traps and will suck you under like sinking sands, I you aren’t careful. Factors sweat you to death, labor exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax officers milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you are still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the Army calls you up and you get shot to death. And if you’re clever enough to stay out of the Army you get bombed to death. Ay, by God, it’s a hard life if you don’t weaken, if you don’t stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the mock, though there ain’t much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow the four-eyed clocks to bits.”

Just spoke Arthur Seaton, twenty-one when we first meet him and twenty-four by the time we leave his life. He turns a lathe in a bicycle factory in Nottinghamshire in England’s Midlands. He makes good money – as much as 14 quid a week on piecework. He could work harder to produce more, but if he did the time and motion man would penalize him, lower his piece rate and he would work harder for the same money. Mug’s game. So, despite the above rant about his status in life, he has already learned to do as he’s told, not stick his neck out and collect his pay on a Friday. At least that’s his technique at work. In private, he has less time for convention.

He lives with his mother and pays her rent, or board as we in the north of England call it. It’s a terraced house, in streets that hang around the factory like piglets being suckled by a sow, as he puts it. Much of his spare time is spent in the pub, where he drinks paint after pint of beer and often chases it down with a spirit or two.

Arthur is a big lad. He’s tall, fair, well-built and can look after himself, so he thinks. He’s already seeing Brenda, a woman older than himself and married to a senior colleague at work. She enjoys him and he enjoys her. He often has to leave her house by the front door when her husband comes home from the night shift. He is two-timing Brenda, seeing another married woman called Winnie, when he meets Doreen quite by chance in a pub. Doreen is single.

She likes to go to the pictures, wants to get married and feels on the shelf at nineteen. We are, by the way, at the end of the 1950s in working class England.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe was one of a series of books in that era that dealt with working class life, in all of its brash and uncultured detail. At the time, these works shocked people. They were repeatedly describing life as it was, without the patronizing lens of middle-class judgment or standards, so commonly applied in English writing. Room at the Top, A Kind of Loving and then Alan Sillitoe’s novel stand out because they became famous films. Albert Finney, the actor, made his name playing Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, albeit in monochrome, a quality that might just also have added comment to the one-dimensionality of the lives depicted. He played the part of the over-the-top, heavy-drinking, devil-may-care antihero of Alan Sillitoe’s novel, but he did not overplay it. The character in print is probably brasher, more uncouth than the screenplay might suggest. By the end, Doreen may just have reformed him, at least rendered him conventional, but only after he has been beaten up at the behest of the husbands he was cheating. What happened to the women involved, we are not told. We surely can guess.

The book is written in northern English dialect, not that far north, but certainly working class. For the record, the quote at the start of this review includes the term four-eyed clocks near the end. For the record, in that particular dialect, this means bespectacled faces. The implication, clear to anyone with the right background, is that the people are bookish, middle-class, grammar school types. In some ways, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is like D H Lawrence a few decades on. But where Lawrence claims a certain dignity for the poverty of working-class life, Alain Sillitoe merely lists its characteristics, being primarily consumerism, one-up-manship and materialism. There seems to be no community here, but much competition.

Some seventy years on, the text has dated. The racist assumptions of these people would not be publishable today but may still be prevalent. But, when all is said and done, they welcome Sam, a Ghanaian-origin sergeant in the British army, with open arms, perhaps because he has achieved a rank to which they aspire, or possible they simply dare not oppose him. And he sounds more civilized than his hosts.

But, as with many iconic works that summed up a bygone age and its assumptions, there remains a sense that, almost three quarters of a century after it was written, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning still resonates today. The material goods may have changed, along with the sums of money needed to acquire them. But the conflict of interests, the class and wealth divisions and the underlying assumptions that characterize antagonism are pretty much unchanged, though today they may appear in changed garb.

 

Jerusalem The Golden by Margaret Drabble

 

Jerusalem The Golden by Margaret Drabble was published over fifty years ago. Reading it now, for this particular reviewer, is the equivalent of reading Arnold Bennett in the same year that Margaret Drabble’s novel was written. Bennett’s quintessential late Victorian and Edwardian identity was then and remains almost foreign territory to the contemporary reader, but – even given the fifty year time shift – one might expect that the reader who actually experienced the 1960s as a teenager might suffer no culture shock whatsoever in reading Margaret Drabble’s essentially 1960s novel. That assumption, however, would be quite wrong.

The mechanics of Jerusalem The Golden’s plot can be described without spoiling the experience of reading the book. Clara is a lower middle-class girl growing up in Northam, which is clearly not far from Margaret Drabble’s own Sheffield, despite being described as being fifty miles or so further from London than its real-life manifestation. Clara clearly rather despises Northam. In her third person narrative that always feels like it wants to inhabit the first, Margaret Drabble has her principal character regularly refer to the dirt, the lack of sophistication and general ugliness of the place, factors that convince Clara – and no doubt the author herself – that life should transfer to London at the first opportunity.

Clara’s family is far from dysfunctional, but then the jury might be out on this because it hardly displays any function at all. Mrs Maugham, Clara’s mother, seems to live her life at arm’s length behind a wall of collected prejudice and panic if experience gets too close. Clara seems determined not to be like her mother.

Clara is successful at school but ignores received opinion as to what she might study, preferring her own judgment to the conventional pragmatism of offered advice. Before she leaves school, Clara has already shown significant signs of maturity. Not only does she develop an obvious but inwardly not perceived independence and individuality, but she also matures physically, developing an early and fine bosom, which she soon realises can be used as a source of power.

In London, where she attends university, Clara meets the unlikely-named Clelia, whose family turns out to be precisely the kind of befuddled, messy, propertied, sophisticated, if rather unclean lineage that would forever be diametrically opposed to her own Maugham household. One feels that if Clara’s mother were invited to the Highgate pad of the Denham family, her nose would turn up in silence as she reached for a mop to disinfect the floors. Strangely, Clelia is rather similar to Clara, both physically and personally, though we do not appreciate this until late in the book, when consciously or otherwise Clara seems to morph into the very identity of her friend.

Clara is a thoroughly credible 1960s character. This misunderstood decade, for most people, was not about free love, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll or protest. Ideologically, it may have become so, but day to day life was school uniforms, dance halls largely segregated by sex, social conservatism and conformity, allied to a newly won, for most people, glimmer of opportunity for self-betterment. Clara exhibits the values of her age, but also gnaws gently at the edges of the constraints, as the era appeared to expect one ought. She surprises herself on a school trip to Paris, but she does retain total control, a facility she learns to cultivate.

And it is this aspect of Clara’s character – its desire and ability to control, to extract exactly what she wants from life in general and circumstances in particular that comes to the fore. Clara desires, Clara gets. She is always self-deprecating, but she even learns to use this flawed confidence to focus attention and facilitation from others when she needs it. Gradually Clara is revealed as someone who ruthlessly uses her physical, personal and intellectual advantages to achieve precisely what she wants, despite the fact that she often tries to deny any conscious plan.

Margaret Drabble’s style throughout is both complex and backward-looking. Clara could easily be a character from fifty years earlier – an Arnold Bennett society debutante, aware of social niceties, protocols and conventions, but needing to make her own way through life’s challenges. But Clara is always ready to assert her presence in a way a woman from fifty years earlier might not have done and thereby she achieves her ends, often irrespective of any potential damage done to others. Her potentially self-destructive success in achieving her wishes is increasingly quite disturbing. Hers is an individualism that also could easily become self-defeating, as evidenced in the author’s assessment that Clara “thought nothing of” being sick in a Paris toilet when she decided to leave her married lover behind. We are left thinking that there is something unsaid to follow. And, if that were to be the case, perhaps a more general parallel with the 1960s decade is possible, in that it might have felt like a liberation for the individual, but also that it might eventually have threatened something that was both longer lasting and longer term. One feels by the end that Clara is set for some pretty rude awakenings.

Life At The Top by John Braine

After recently re-reading John Braine’s Room at the Top, I went On Chesil Beach, courtesy of Ian McEwan. Without doubt the latter is a masterpiece, whereas the former seems to be a little too reliant on its contemporary setting, its social mores, its finely tuned appreciation of social class to be considered more than “of its time”. Concatenating the two books, however, has made me think a little more about the underpinning thesis of Ian McEwan’s book, that the early 1960s remained an age when sexuality was not discussed, dealt with or even experienced in the more open, liberal manner of just a decade later. In the context of Ian McEwan’s setting and for his characters, this was undoubtedly the case. Memories of John Braine’s 1950s, however, remind me that there might have been room for a different reading.

And so I approached a re-discovery of Braine’s Life At The Top with more than just an interest in the narrative. Of course the book is a sequel, an attempt to recreate the success that had eluded its author in the intervening years. But it is based in the early 1960s, precisely the time when Ian McEwan’s fumbling lovers marry.

Life At The Top is ten years on from its germ. Joe Lampton and Susan are married and have two children. Joe is also firmly ensconced in his father-in-law’s firm, has made a moderate success of his career and, certainly relative to others around Warley, has plenty of money. But as those for whom success seems to be a given, it is necessary to be reminded that, “It’s one thing to get there, and quite another thing to stay there”. And so it is with Joe Lampton. He becomes a councilor – a Tory one at that – and all seems to be made. But then, but then… he’s still our Joe. He still likes his pint, though now it’s more likely to be a scotch, and perhaps Susan is still as naïve as she was a decade before – naïve, that is, until she decides what she wants.

So, obviously, in Life At The Top Joe and Susan’s life together turns sour, even a little bitter. But John Braine’s plot and style always keep the process above soap opera, where character only exists to fuel plot. In some ways, the pair of novels, Room and Life At The Top, is a loose allegory of the experience of the author, himself. In Room he’s an upstart successfully staking his claim, but at a cost in terms of pigeon-holing and confinement to a genre. In Life he’s a known success and is clawing on to its retention.

But after finishing the book two points stand out. The first is a reminder of the apparent sexual liberty enjoyed by its characters. Not only Joe, but also Susan and eventually Norah, not to mention the ailing Mark, are apparently free-loaders. Only Mark’s wife seems to possess the frigidity, perhaps aridity, that Ian McEwan seems to associate with the era. I can remember when Life At The Top was a much watched film. It was seen as racy, even a bit risqué, but not because of what it portrayed, only that it was portrayed. It wasn’t the content that shocked; it was the fact that the content was made public.

On the other hand, if John Braine’s mission had been purely to shock, then the ultimate morality of the outcome would be incongruous at best. Life At The Top is the kind of novel where what happens is crucial, so to reveal the finishing point would detract from the experience of reading the book. Suffice it to say that, in its own way, Life At The Top becomes an affirmation of a given set of values, even if those who want to live by them do not always live up to them.

So I return again to On Chesil Beach and conclude that there may be a greater element of social class – or even stereotype – involved in Ian McEwan’s reading of the mores of that age. A shortcoming it might be, but it detracts in no way whatsoever from the quality of the book. The imagined rules applied to those described, despite the fact that, as John Braine’s Life At The Top reminds us, they might not actually have been rules and certainly didn’t apply to everyone, especially the imagined.

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Life at the Top

A social climber, our Joe - A review of A Room At The Top by John Braine

It’s fifty years since A Room At The Top first appeared. Against a backdrop of post-war Britain, a period when people really did believe that a new future, a different kind of society was just around the corner, Joe Lampton, born January 1921, aspired to social and economic elevation. Though competent and already promoted as a local government officer in a grubby northern English town, with spare time interests in amateur dramatics, cigarettes and beer, even he himself rated his prospects of success as very poor. But Joe’s other passion was the ladies.

Two in particular caught his eye. Alice Aisgarth was married, older than him, and had a local reputation for being a bit “forward”. Basically she wanted love and passion to light up her dull, unhappy life with excitement. Susan Brown was a different prospect entirely, being nineteen, virginal and daughter of a rich businessman. If Joe Lampton could never work his way to wealth, he might just be able to marry it. His problems arose out of Susan’s desire to remain pure during their courtship, a position that meant Joe had to continue seeing Alice to satisfy his needs. Further complications arose when Susan relented and fell immediately pregnant. Well Joe achieved his goal. He and Susan married and he attained what he had sought all along, a meal ticket for life. He was not entirely without conscience, however. So when the rejected Alice, who deeply loved him, is killed in a car crash after a drunken night trying to drown her sorrows, Joe Lampton does suffer some remorse. But eventually, like many social climbers, he achieves his heights by trampling on others.

What remains enduringly intriguing about Room At The Top is its portrayal of British society’s obsession with social class. Joe perceives his best chance of social elevation is to marry money. And, in 2007, I re-read this novel in a week when a United Kingdom report declared that current day social class differences were widening, whilst opportunities for social mobility are actually decreasing. So John Braine’s novel is also a social document. The book is very much of its own time. It reminds us, for instance, that in the 1950s everyone smoked – and smoked a lot. Men drank pints in the pub – some of which did not even admit women. Homosexuality was not only not tolerated, it was illegal, though remained visible.

Some of the recorded individual aspiration now seems nothing less than quaint. Alice Aisgarth, for instance, declares that she would like to sleep with Joe. “Truly sleep,” she qualifies, “in a big bed with a feather mattress and brass rails and a porcelain chamber pot underneath it.” In the 1950s, most north of England houses did not have bathrooms and the potties were usually enamel.

But it is in the area of social class that A Room At The Top is bitingly and enduringly apt. Joe Lampton believes he lacks the capacity to succeed, lacks the necessary background, the poise, the breeding. He sees himself as essentially vulgar and possesses no talents which might compensate for this drawback. His rival for Susan Brown’s affections, however, is one John Wales. He is studying for a science degree at Cambridge, and thus acquiring not only the knowledge which will ensure that he will become the managing director of the family firm, but will also endow the polish of manner, the habit of command, the calm superiority of bearing, the attributes of a gentleman. 

Fifty years on, we might change an odd word, and the family firm might now be multi-national, but the spirit of contemporary Britain’s class system is arguably the same. And so despite the aspiration for and perceived attainment of social change in post-war Britain, Room At The Top, juxtaposed with recent evidence, reminds us that very little, if anything, has changed – except for the cigarettes and the chamber pots, of course. Oh, and we might now also prefer lager.

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