The Bottle Factory Outing

Post World War 2 London. 2 young girls struggling to create a life for themselves. Misadventures ensue culminating in a death and all the consequences that stem from that event. You can’t help laugh even in the midst of tragedy.

Whatever this story might be thought to lack, it's not originality. Bottling wine out of imported casks and labelling the bottles in an Italian-owned plant in London is presumably a mechanised operation these days. However time was when people did these jobs, and they were real people with real hearts and souls like the rest of us. These are `small' people with `small' lives. The hopes and aspirations of the two leading characters are small. Neither they nor anyone else in the story mean any harm to anyone, and nobody does anything particularly `wrong'. Death touches one of the little group on their little works outing to Windsor in the rain, and the thing that makes the whole tale so terribly sad is that they can all get away with their grotesque obsequies for her - nobody else will ever know she is dead. How easy you will find the book to read I can't say. By the standards of modern novels it is short, the style of writing is the opposite of flamboyant or elaborate, and you may have to keep reminding yourself who is who until you are well into the plot. The characters are differentiated well enough, I suppose, but what they all do say and think is within a very restricted range, and that just goes with the territory. I found it, genuinely, deeply touching. Death the great leveller is cheated of his levelling at least to the extent that his victim's send-off is unusual in the extreme. If the rest of them can hold their tongues nobody will learn of her death because more or less nobody else knew she was alive. How many leave our society unnoticed, I wonder, without either such a unique funeral or such a gifted narrator to bring us their story.

Two frazzled women brace themselve for the annual company outing. Another minor masterpiece from Bainbridge. The irony is heavy, as always. The characters are vivid and memorable, even those who...how do I describe this...are not vivid and memorable. Bainbridge seems to know every person I've ever known, and she keeps throwing them at me. She brings even the palest, most dishwater of personalities to life in a way that I've never seen an author do before. The story is barely present through much of the book, as is true in much of Bainbridge's writing; not much happens. It's the people and their interactions that move the story more than any plot devices. Then something happens that throws the banality of the characters' lives completely off course, and it's that something, and their reaction to it, that crystallizess the story's theme. The funny thing about Bainbridge is that I'm never entirely sure just what the theme is. Or maybe I know what the theme is, but I don't know how to put it into words. If the typical themes of novels are cliches like, "Life is short," or "Money can't buy happiness," then any attempt to articulate Bainbridge's themes would start with something like, "It's really hard to explain, but you know how you feel when...."

It was a toss up between "The Dressmaker" and"The Bottle Factory Outing" when I decided to check outBeryl Bainbridge. I plumbed for the latter - the quaintly offbeat storyline was curiously enticing, promising both "funfull" reading and a sense of the ridiculous - black comedy in short. I wasn't disappointed. The novel is populated by largely unsympathetic characters but Bainbridge's empathy for their sense of desperation and need to find some form of escape from their drudgery makes them funny, touching and ultimately very human. I found her prose accessible, uncomplicated and highly enjoyable. The blurb at the back of the book promised more. But the ending is simply delicious..and hilarious.

Beryl Bainbridge has a wonderfully dark and twisted view of the world. This book is a classic example of her ability to take 'ordinary' suburban characters and situations and turn them in to something quite extraordinary. This was the first Beryl Bainbridge book I ever read - and it remains one of my favourites. It would make a great independent movie...