A Quiet Life [Paperback]

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

This early Bainbridge novel has all her hallmarks - a murderously wry insight into hypocrisy and self-delusion balanced by an unsentimental understanding of the larger picture which renders the sneaking and creeping pitiful rather than menacing. Adept at using large historical events as a springboard into fictional reconstruction, Bainbridge keeps her attention focused on a stiflingly small canvas, her prose as restrained as the lives it dissects. Unremitting domestic strife and the suffocating struggle to uphold the manners of shabby genteel poverty define the lives of a family in the 1950s. The novel fades towards the end but this is still an unforgettable read. (Kirkus UK)

Her last novel, Sweet William (1976), began the swing away from the elements of surreptitious surprise which introduced this writer from the beginning as an accomplished teller of horror stories. Predictable stories to a degree, since they were so well founded in commonplace experience. This is slighter than Sweet William and as quiet as its title, unless you listen to the underside of what's being said. Between the cursory interchange of the first chapter and the ironic coda of the last, Bainbridge fills in the WW II years of Alan and Madge, nearly grown children of a descending middle-class family. Father has fallen on hard times - he also has bad "turns" everyone overlooks. Mother, no longer mothering, spends her evenings with her "fancy man," while Madge is out in the dunes with a German prisoner of war. Home gets short shrift - so does Father whose last spell is fatal and unattended. . . . This is the most unassuming of writers, the most careful in the choice of the right word and the right detail to complete a portrait of a family imperceptibly falling away. It's as plain as that black pudding Father perhaps should not have eaten, but how remarkably Beryl Bainbridge raises familiarity to the plateau of excellence. (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

People thought nothing could disturb the even tenor of Alan's family life. But they didn't know about his sister Madge's forbidden passion or his mother's disappearances. This novel was first published in 1976.