Father! Father! Burning Bright [Paperback]

Beginning life as a 1982 BBC TV screenplay entitled Intensive Care, Father! Father! Burning Bright was subsequently transformed into prose by Alan Bennett "in the hope of finding more to the character" Midgley than had emerged from its screen version. The result is vintage Alan Bennett.

Father! Father! Burning Bright is a bittersweet comedy of manners based on the humdrum existence of Denis Midgley, an ineffectual schoolteacher reviled by his elderly father, bored wife and dull pupils, who is abruptly pulled from a parent's evening to be told that his father is dying. "On the many occasions Midgley had killed his father death had always come easily". When fantasy fades and reality bites, however, Midgley finds himself reassessing his relationship with his father as he clings to life and Midgley camps outside the under-resourced hospital that pays scant attention to the life or death of Midgley senior. As bored relatives shuffle in and out, Midgley strikes up an unlikely relationship with Nurse Valery that leads to an unlikely victory for Midgley's father. Told with Bennett's trademark spareness and laconic approach to life, death and life up north, Father! Father! Burning Bright is a perfect introduction to Bennett's writing. --Jerry Brotton

Alan Bennett's second story. This time, set in the 1970s, in classic Bennett country, Yorkshire. 'On the many occasions Midgley had killed his father, death had always come easily. He died promptly, painlessly and without a struggle. Looking back, Midgley could see that even in these imagined deaths he had failed his father. It was not like him to die like that. Nor did he.' Midgley is determined to deny his father a last occasion to be disappointed in him. He will do the right thing and sit by his father's bed-side in Intensive Care until he dies. But, even when he is unconscious, his father manages to make Midgley's life a misery. This is another classic story by Alan Bennett, with brilliant portraits of social hypocrisy and stifling family relationships.

Alan Bennett's many stage and television plays and his prose collection, Writing Home, have made him one of Britain's best-loved authors. He has a huge international reputation for his plays and films which include: Habeus Corpus, Kafka's Dick, Private Function, The Madness of George III and many others †often multi-prize winning. But it is his fiction (The Clothes They Stood Up In