Beryl Bainbridge's funny and alarming [novel, Winter Garden,] sentences its hero—who is, by his own complacent admission, 'ordinary and boring'—to a course of accidental dislocation and anxious self-investigation. He wanders out of his marriage, pretending that he's off to fish in Scotland: instead, motivelessly, he flies to Russia with his elusive and erratic mistress who soon after they arrive unaccountably disappears.
Beryl Bainbridge's is a world of paranoid comedy, where nothing can be trusted to work, where the routine which used to govern the novel is grotesquely involuted or else suspended. Her hero's destination is significant, because the official Russia which the characters—junketing artists—visit is a society where the individual's will and his control of his own experience have been removed from him, and where an obfuscating bureaucracy turns the most elementary manoeuvre into a mystery—a society of politically imposed absurdism. Her deconstellated and bemused characters, aghast at the mishaps which befall them, look to solid objects as existential anchors and lucky charms, evidence that the world might after all be real and not hallucinatory; but these objects prove slippery and treacherous. The hero, translated from Chelsea to the land of Gogol, loses first his hat, then his luggage, later his bathplugs…. Not even his body is his own property…. [He] is warned that he may forfeit his nose: strangers are apt to tweak your proboscis abruptly in the street, because they can see it's getting frostbitten. His wife superstitiously wears cotton gloves to bed, being 'very proud of her nails'. She does well to protect her assets, since his body stages a gruesome uprising against his control of it, pimpling venereally and on one occasion luridly exploding: 'As a youth with a boil on his neck he had gone once to a Promenade concert. The orchestra had played a particularly thunderous piece, and when the percussionist had stood up to clash his cymbals the boil had burst.' Sex is an antic balancing act, a struggle to keep the lowly and accident-prone body from disgracing itself. (pp. 699-700)
This is a free excerpt of 337 words. There are 459 words (approx.
2 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Bainbridge, Beryl 1933–: Critical Essay by Peter Conrad Access Pass.
