According to Queeney

Beryl Bainbridge seems to be an author people either love or hate; there just doesn't seem to be much inbetween. Personally, I love her books and I think she certainly must be one of today greatest living authors."According to Queeney" is, in my opinion, one of Bainbridge's very best. In this book she tells us much about the life and times of Samuel Johnson, the 18th century poet, editor of Shakespeare, journalist, critic, lexicographer, novelist, biographer and playwright.Most people owe what they do know about Samuel Johnson to James Boswell whose biography of Johnson is considered by many to be the greatest biography ever written and surely the greatest ever written in the English language. Boswell, however, committed a grave error when he wrote his biography of Johnson; he fell in love with his subject matter. Boswell revered Johnson so much that he simply couldn't bring himself to include the darker side of Johnson's life, and it did have its darker side. It is this side...the darker one...that Bainbridge explores in "According to Queeney." As anyone who's ever engaged in gossip knows, our darker moments are far more interesting that are our lighter ones. No wonder this book is so good.Queeney really did exist and she really was acquainted with Johnson. Her real name was Hester Maria Thrale and she was the eldest daughter of Hester Lynch Thrale and Henry Thrale, a wealthy, 18th century brewer who just happened to be Johnson's closest friend and confidante. Queeney is even mentioned in Boswell's biography of Johnson; she died in 1858, at the age of ninety-four, so she was no doubt the last surviving person to actually know Johnson personally.The lives of Johnson and the Thrale's were intertwined, to some extent, for a full twenty years. Johnson retained his own room in the home of the Thrales, called "Streatham Park," and he even taught Latin to the Thrale children. His confidante extraordinaire became Mrs. Thrale, and, by all accounts, she came to know the deeper, darker side of the great Samuel Johnson.Bainbridge has chosen to tell her story of Johnson from several viewpoints, all to the good, I think. We encounter an omniscient, third-person narrator; an assortment of Johnson's friends; Mr. and Mrs. Thrale, of course; Johnson's housekeeper; Mrs. Desmoulins, a one-time companion to Johnson's wife; and Queeney, the most important and by far, the most captivating. Queeney's story is told in her own voice and through a series of genuine letters that are strewn throughout the book. The letters were written years after Johnson's death and are in the form of reminiscences. They give us a very vivid picture of Samuel Johnson, not according to Boswell, but, as Bainbridge tells us "according to Queeney."Bainbridge's (and Queeney's) Samuel Johnson is a far darker, and more interesting personality than the one we meet in the pages of Boswell's biography. According to Queeney, Johnson was a man who suffered from frequent bouts of melanc

I found this book to be delightfully unusual! Two irascible, unappealing, but compelling chracters. I was somewhat familiar with Samuel Johnson having made my way through about half of Boswell's tome. Bainbridge has a remarkable gift for twisting life into one big ambiguity, filled with magic and darkness. According to Queeney follows Johnson's last twenty years and his friendship with the Thrale family. Most of the characters are enormously self-centered, remiss in love and filled with below first level longings. I found it to be odd and entertaining.

This is novel number 16 for Ms. Beryl Bainbridge. In addition to these she has written an additional 4 works. Of the first 15 novels, 5 have been nominated for the prestigious Booker Award, however it has never been granted to her work. If there is another writer who has had one third of their work nominated but not rewarded, I have not come across one. Many other awards have found their way to this tremendous storyteller; I hope the Booker Folks catch up."According To Queeney", demonstrates once again the ease with which Ms. Beryl Bainbridge can reach, both back into history and to some of the great players of their times, and not only grasp, but create wonderful new tales. The century of choice this time is the 18th, and she chooses the formidable Samuel Johnson as her focus. This person alone would be plenty for most writers, however she has added actor David Garrick, poet Oliver Goldsmith, novelist Fanny Burney, and artist Joshua Reynolds. Each of these people could fill their own book, and more than one has. The brilliance of this work is that the author manages to bring them all together, give them all they're due, and does so in a fairly brief 216 pages. She does not merely name drop or make a passing reference. She manages to make all of the various players memorable, however brief their words allotted may appear to be. The truth is they read with much greater length.A young counterpoint to Johnson is the Queeney of the title. An extremely precocious child, she is a favorite of Johnson's as well as a talented young mind he seeks to cultivate. This same Queeney becomes a correspondent for a researcher investigating her memories of her young years, as they relate to her and her mother, the latter of the two who Johnson becomes emotionally attached to. The mother eventually becomes available for marriage, and the events surrounding this opportunity bring the threads of the story together, and then to a close.This is one of the best books that Ms. Bainbridge has written. I hope the people who nominate and then award The Booker Prize, once again nominate this work, which they make a decision that differs from those in the past. If they do not, when her next work is released, she will then be the 6 times nominated author for the award.

Readers of the Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin series will undoubtedly recognize that Queeney in Bainbridge's new novel is the same Queenie in Aubrey's life. For fans of the Aubrey series, the importance of Queenie needs not be re-stated here. While "According to Queeney" is worthy to be read in its own right, O'Brian fans have the added pleasure of discovering new aspects of Queenie and her world.

Beryl Bainbridge's new historical novel takes a fresh, and rather disturbing, look at Samuel Johnson, LL.D., the eminent 18th century lexicographer and man of letters. Dr. Johnson (as he is usually referred to) is, of course, well-known as the subject of English literature's first great biography, James Boswell's "The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D." (1791). But Boswell, who worshipped Johnson, failed to include some of the less appealing and less attractive aspects of Johnson's life and personality. It is these that Bainbridge writes about in "According to Queeney."Queeney was the real-life daughter of Hester Lynch Thrale, one of Johnson's closest friends and confidantes. In fact, Johnson lived, off and on, at Mrs. Thrale's estate, Streatham Park. Through the voice of a third-person narrator, along with a series of letters written by Queeney to her girlhood friends, we discover that Dr. Johnson was deeply depressed (or melancholic, as they called it back then), obsessed with death, sexually conflicted, and a masochist--in short, a bundle of neurotic tics and rifts. Bainbridge's book is brilliant not only in its expose of the dark side of Dr. Johnson, but also in its depiction of the literary and social world of 18th century London, especially the upper classes. While non-specialists in this period of English literature may be challenged to keep up with who's who and what's what, in the end the challenge is well worth taking up.