Mastering Georgie? A brief introduction to Beryl Bainbridge's novel



Matthew Bradley

Linacre College, Oxford University

Mastering Georgie? A Brief Introduction to Beryl Bainbridge’s Novel

На примере романа «Мастер Джорджи» в статье анализируется творчество известной английской писательницы Б. Бейнбридж. Главы романа, повествующие о главном герое, хирурге и фотографе Джордже Харди, от лица трех рассказчиков, воссоздают события Крымской войны, оригинальный сплав нечетких негативов (названий глав) и четкого, неповторимого стиля автора.

Confronted by any new text or author, the first instinct of both teachers and students tends to be to reach for ‘where they fit in’. Are they modernists or postmodernists? Typical or atypical of fiction of their time? Who are their influences? What are their political affiliations, if any? All worthwhile and relevant questions but, as T. S. Eliot famously observed, a truly great writer re-draws the boundary lines of literary history and tradition anyway. And even if I wouldn’t make quite so grand a claim as this for Beryl Bainbridge, it’s certainly true that she is a writer who tends to encourage one out of this habit of literary taxonomy. She herself confesses to engaging with modern fiction very little, remarking in one interview about the time of Master Georgie that she read almost nothing of it, as ‘nowadays, unless a writer is superb, I don’t think it’s enough just to go wuffling on.’ Yet in many ways this is surprising, as on paper (or rather, not on paper) Bainbridge seems a thoroughly establishment figure. Well-known on the literary scene, much interviewed on the radio and in the press, she has been publishing novels since 1967 and was made a Dame in the year 2000. Her greatest successes came relatively late in her career, with a three book deal in the 1990s that saw her move into the genre of historical fiction and which earned her more critical plaudits, and sales, than she had ever enjoyed before. Of these novels, The Birthday Boys (1991) dealt with Scott of the Antarctic, Every Man for Himself (1996) was set on board the Titanic, and the last, Master Georgie (1998) saw Bainbridge turn her attention to the Crimean War. It’s a novel that demonstrates the concentrated, distinctive flavour of her writing. In fact, in many ways this tale of a very Victorian war is typical Beryl Bainbridge, and thus absolutely atypical of everyone else.

The title character, George Hardy, is a part-time surgeon and a part-time photographer, and the story of the novel is really the story of the fascination that his personality exerts, as felt through the book’s three narrators. The first is Myrtle, absolutely devoted to Georgie, an orphan taken in by the Hardy family after she is found abandoned outside an orphanage beside a body being nibbled by rats. The second is Pompey Jones, more sceptical but equally fascinated by George, an urchin who begins as a photographer’s assistant, occasionally moonlights as a fire eater and who almost throughout the novel is amoral, duplicitious, self-serving and - it almost goes without saying - rather likeable. Finally there is Dr Potter, a geologist and traditionalist who believes in education, standards and sex. He seems to pin a strange sort of hope to George, looking up to him both as a soldier and as a man. It’s almost a formal feature of the novel that the readers never get to know its central character directly - we never even come close to mastering George. That’s another Bainbridge characteristic: economy, both in language and in the amount of narrative information that she’s willing to give out. Hugely important matters such as the fact that Myrtle has borne George’s children, or that Pompey has been George’s occasional lover, are generally revealed to the reader in passing or parenthesis, and can easily be missed. By making every word and phrase count, often when reading Bainbridge there’s a nagging feeling that you’re missing something, a feeling that shouldn’t be put down by non-English speakers to any failing on their part. It’s very much a deliberate effect of her careful prose. As in life, information doesn’t grab your attention in proportion to its narrative importance, but drip feeds into your consciousness by means of surprise remarks and chance encounters.

When the Crimean War breaks out, Myrtle, Pompey and Potter follow George eastwards across Europe, and all four of them slowly become enmeshed in the horrors of the conflict. As we move closer and closer to Sebastopol, the reader realizes that this is a tale of grotesques caught in a larger grotesquerie, a carnival entertainment gradually being devoured by a carnival of monsters. And Bainbridge’s re-writing of the Crimean War as a circus nightmare is an interesting, and again, typical of her. Many of her earlier novels had drawn on her experience as an actress in a Liverpool repertory company, particularly An Awfully Big Adventure (1989), later made into a film with Hugh Grant. In Master Georgie A vision of Victorian Liverpool, we encounter a dead body comically pushed around in carriages, a puff-adder that attacks a Punch and Judy man, an ape enduring a cataract operation. There’s even a tiger-skin rug in the Hardys’ living room. What is striking is that for all the mud and death and horror of the Crimea -it’s a well-known fact that more British troops died of disease in the stinking conditions of their encampment in this war than died in action - the performance goes on. We meet Mrs Yardley, once on the stage, and one of the centrepieces of the second half of the novel is the concert party is played for the soldiers at Varna (Pompey is on fire eating duties). The gradual introduction into this blackly comic world of suffering and spectacle on an international scale is arresting precisely because it - almost - slips in unnoticed. By the last, literal, tableau, when George’s dead body is propped up to make up the balance for a survivors’ photograph to send home, we’ve come circle from the ignoble treatment of George’s father’s body in Liverpool at the beginning. It’s nearly come to seem unremarkable, part of the same vision. Lamenting the horrors of a disastrous war is a relatively easy thing for a writer to do, and a still easier thing for a reader to understand (the reason why First World War poetry remains so popular in British schools, but often taught with little reference to how it works as poetry). And there is some of this, such as when Potter rails against the aristocratic ignorance of the British generals, but Bainbridge also manages to do something different and perhaps more interesting - showing that the theatre of war is uncomfortably close to the smaller acts of violence and moments of indignity that animate the theatre of ‘normal’ life.

It’s also easy when dealing with war literature to start talking in very general terms, another trap that Bainbridge avoids. Like her other historical novels, Master Georgie is absolutely brim-full of its period, with its plot redolent of Thackeray, its references to Ruskin and its twisting of Tennyson. It also reminds one that while Bainbridge may not have many close literary relatives in contemporary British fiction, her work often has a strong flavour of Dickens, grand master of the nineteenth century grotesque. But of course where Dickens tends towards the voluminous, Bainbridge is addicted to concentration. You’d never find the author of The Pickwick Papers or Little Dorrit trying to contain all his wild, eccentric characters and their bizarre situations within a single thematic focus, but that’s exactly the kind of distillation that Bainbridge attempts with Master Georgie and photography - and pulls it off brilliantly. The newly emergent field of picture-taking is obviously the centre of the novel (each chapter called a ‘Plate’ etc), and, indeed, the Crimean conflict was the first war during which photographs of the troops were widely disseminated, part of the fuel for the public outcry. But it’s astonishing how it radiates out into every corner of the text. We see George as we see a figure in a photograph, visible but unknowable. Myrtle learns to distrust isolated tableaux when Pompey’s apparent act of kindness turns out to be a confidence trick. We’re reminded by Potter of the unwitting deception practised by all photography, in that it affects permanence in a world of inherent transience - a kind of ‘black magic’ as he puts it. Moreover, Potter is a geologist struggling with the discoveries recently made by Charles Lyell regarding the fossil record, discoveries whose main impact was to vastly increase the perceived age of the earth. Suddenly, it’s literally a new world: the idea of imposing narrative on such unimaginable amounts of time seems naive at best, ludicrous at worst. What else are we left with but the world as a disconnected series of ‘plates’, images that can no longer even be connected into a coherent story, never mind a complete one?

And then as now, photography exists on a strange cusp between story-making and reportage. It’s both history and fiction, science and art, a craft that demands great technical knowledge but requires an even greater capacity for invention, sometimes even for deception. Thus the idea of photography can even come to stand for the novel itself, negotiating, as all ‘historical fiction’ must, the strange interplay between its two constituent parts. One rather witty reviewer said of Master Georgie that it could hardly be called a feelgood novel - ‘unless you’re a reader whose spirits are lifted by the prospect of a writer so original and so firmly in control of her art’. I wouldn’t hesitate to agree, and while it’s sometimes said that Bainbridge novels are something of an acquired taste, as usual with such things, it’s one that is well worth acquiring.