Master Georgie: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, 1998 - Softcover

Bainbridge, Beryl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349111693 ISBN 13: 9780349111698

Publisher: Abacus, 1999

Synopsis

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 1998
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GUARDIAN FICTION PRIZE
WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT MEMORIAL PRIZE FOR FICTION
WINNER OF THE WH SMITH BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD

When Master Georgie - George Hardy, surgeon and photographer - sets off from the cold squalor of Victorian Liverpool for the heat and glitter of the Bosphorus to offer his services in the Crimea, there straggles behind him a small caravan of devoted followers; Myrtle, his adoring adoptive sister; lapsed geologist Dr Potter; and photographer's assistant and sometime fire-eater Pompey Jones, all of them driven onwards through a rising tide of death and disease by a shared and mysterious guilt.

Combining a breathtaking eye for beauty with a visceral understanding of mortality, Beryl Bainbridge exposes her enigmatic hero as tenderly and unsparingly as she reveals the filth and misery of war, and creates a novel of luminous depth and extraordinary intensity.

About this title

Review:

Beryl Bainbridge seems drawn to disaster. First she tackled the Unfortunate Scott expedition to the South Pole in The Birthday Boys; later (but emphatically pre-DiCaprio) came the sinking of the Titanic, in Every Man for Himself. Now, in her third historical novel (and her 16th overall), she takes on the Crimean War, and the result is a slim, gripping volume with all of the doomed intensity of the Light Brigade's charge--but, thankfully, without the Tennysonian bombast. "Some pictures," a character confides, "would only cause alarm to ordinary folk." There's a warning concealed here, and one that easily disturbed readers would do well to heed: Master Georgie is intense, disturbing, revelatory--and not always pretty to look at.

Bainbridge's narrative circles around the enigmatic figure of George Hardy, a surgeon, amateur photographer, alcoholic and repressed homosexual who counters the dissipation of his prosperous Liverpool life by heading for the Crimean Peninsula in 1854. His journey and subsequent tour of duty are told in three very different voices: Myrtle, an orphan whose lifelong loyalty to her "Master Georgie" becomes an overriding obsession; Pompey Jones, street urchin, fire-eater, photographer and George's sometime lover; and Dr. Potter, George's scholarly brother-in-law, whose retreat from the war's carnage and into books takes on a tinge of madness.

United by a sudden death in a Liverpool brothel in 1846, these characters plumb the curious workings of love, war, class and fate. In between, Bainbridge frames an unforgettable series of tableaux morts: a dying soldier, one lens of his glasses "fractured into a spider's web"; a decapitated leg, toes "poking through the shreds of a cavalry boot"; two dead men "on their knees, facing one another, propped up by the pat-a-cake thrust of their hands." Glimpsed as if sideways and then passed over in language that is as understated as it is lovely, these are images that sear into the brain. Master Georgie is full of such moments, horrors painted with an exquisite brush. --Mary Park

Review:

A quirky and compelling book, packed with witty observations and extraordinary characters, which really ought to have won the Booker prize, but missed it by a whisker (Daily Mail)

It is hard to think of anyone now writing who understands the human heart as Beryl Bainbridge does (The Times)

Truly extraordinary, heartbreakingly good (Sunday Telegraph)

The economy of Bainbridge's writing, for which she is famous, results in a slender novel with an astonishing range (Independent on Sunday)

Another masterly exploration by an author at the peak of her form...She was always good at funny dialogue and acute observation of the oddities of human behaviour, but her recent historical explorations have given full reign to her startling powers of description (Daily Telegraph)

"I intend to survive," announces Pompey Jones as he goes into a climactic battle of the Crimean War, near the end of Beryl Bainbridge's remarkable new novel...The marvelous trick Ms. Bainbridge pulls off is that she tells her story so elliptically that you have to pay attention to her every word. No conversation is wasted (New York Times)

Beryl Bainbridge is one of Britain's best-loved novelists. She has twice won the prestigious Whitbread Prize and has been shortlisted five times for the Booker Prize, most recently for Master Georgie, her sixteenth and perhaps most accomplished novel. When the strongly favored book didn't win, the cry of "Foul" from the literary arena echoed through the land (Paris Review)

Offers perhaps the most brilliant demonstration yet of her matchless gift for storytelling concision and subtle suggestiveness...Bainbridge creates a haunting picture of a world in which human relationships are ruled by accident and people's understanding of others is decisively distorted and limited by their own inner natures...An exemplary work from one of Britain's finest writers (Kirkus)

It is hard to think of anyone now writing who understands the human heart as Beryl Bainbridge does (THE TIMES)

Another masterly exploration by an author at the peak of her form ...She was always good at funny dialogue and acute observation of the oddities of human behaviour, but her recent historical explorations have given full reign to her startling powers of d (DAILY TELEGRAPH)

About this edition

• Publisher: Abacus
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0349111693
• ISBN 13: 9780349111698
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224