A quiet life - Softcover

Bainbridge, Beryl

3.48

558 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006156428 ISBN 13: 9780006156420

Publisher: Fontana, 1979

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

In the shabby, cluttered confines of their small house in an English seaside village just after World War II, a family of genteel poverty struggles daily, unremittingly, with itself. To escape the endless quarrel, the romantically disappointed mother spends half the night reading novels in the railway station, while the melancholy father weeps in front of the radio. The fifteen-year-old daughter sneaks off after dark to meet a German P.O.W. in the woods, and her brother, Alan, through whom we experience the domestic nightmare, suffers the family he tries to ignore and cannot alter, at least not until it has been destroyed.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

Anything for A Quiet Life: this reissue of a novel first published in 1976 was written before Bainbridge's recent turn to historical fiction, and reworks the semi-autobiographical terrain familiar from her early novels, a post-war lower-middle-class setting characterised by meanness, frustration and emotional evasion.

The respectable facade of Alan's family conceals a mounting range of quirks and dysfunctions. His father chafes and rages under obscure financial humiliations. His younger sister, Madge, is having secret meetings with a German POW. His mother is making regular trips into the night, to pursue her own illicit pleasures in an empty railway station. Their desperation leaks from between the lines of Bainbridge's elliptical prose, or emanates from the grotesqueries of telling period detail--from liberty-bodices, fly-paper, the "swollen crust" of a meat pie, the "small scab" kept unhealed upon Alan's father's head from its repeated collision with the mantelpiece in the family's cramped and over-furnished kitchen. The drive is towards tragedy; but even tragedy strikes, in this understated world, with deadening calm, and via domestic metaphor. Alan's unleashing of fatal passions is accompanied by his breaking of the family clock. The resulting silence is both real and symbolic, and pursues him into his adult life. Like many Bainbridge novels, this one finally compels you to return to its start, to reread opening events in the light of a gained painful knowledge.--Sarah Waters

Review:

The underrated A Quiet Life is one of the funniest books I have ever read . . . There is something shockingly plain about her strongest books, utterly uncompromising. (Hilary Mantel)

One of the best novelists of her generation. (Guardian)

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.