Winter Garden
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'Brilliant ... marvellous comedy ... a tour de force' OBSERVER 'A very funny as well as a frightening book' GUARDIAN 'Marvellously deft ... comedy is secreted everywhere, like honey; but it is a surreal little honeycomb, with sharp teeth' TLS
Product Description
Quiet and reliable, Douglas Ashburner has never been much of a womaniser. So when he begins an extra-marital affair with Nina, a bossy, temperamental artist with a penchant for risky sex, he finds adultery a terrible strain. He tells his wife that he needs a rest, so she happily packs him off for a fishing holiday in the Highlands. Only, unknown to her, Douglas is actually flying off to Moscow with Nina, as a guest of the Soviet Artists' Union. It is then that things begin to get very complicated indeed...
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One morning early in October, a man called Ashburner, tightly buttoned into a black overcoat and holding a suitcase, tried to leave his bedroom on the second floor of a house in Beaufort Street. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
One morning early in October, a man called Ashburner, tightly buttoned into a black overcoat and holding a suitcase, tried to leave his bedroom on the second floor of a house in Beaufort Street. Read the first page
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Beryl Bainbridge takes a caste of her characteristic grotesque-mundane characters to Soviet Russia with all their compulsions, banalities and neurotic tics, bag and baggage, transporting them to a world of bureaucracy and incomprehensible muddle in which the unaccountable is the normal. Bainbridge plays the full gamut of her comic tricks with her displaced persons, especially the helpless Ashburner who doesn't know why he's there, what he's doing, where his mistress or his luggage are and why his only possession is his fishing rod, which he took along to convince his wife (who couldn't give a bean anyway) that he was going for a piscatory holiday in Scotland. Style is superb, full of comic deflations and bathos, sharp arabesques, swoops and dives of pitch, in which the 'little people' engrossed in their own obsessive concerns negotiate terra incognita. Told with a knowing terse naivete typical of earlier Bainbridge. The central symbol of the Winter Garden refers to the bare patch of earth in Ashburner's back garden, never reached by sun, and icy Mother Russia. Displacement is a metaphor for all Bainbridge's people, who move through a demonic dream in which both anxiety and comic tension build, crazily lurching to a predestined conclusion.
4 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I began reading this with high hopes, based on the extracts of reviews on the back cover which proclaimed "razor sharp", "very funny" and "marvellously deft", but my expectations were soon dashed. The scenario is promising and in the right hands could have been hilarious, but that is not how it pans out. There is virtually no background, and the characters are inadequately described for us to work up much enthusiasm about what happens to them. In fact the author's approach is quite undisciplined, as if it's too much trouble to set the thing down properly. There is no sense of tension or narrative thread, the plot (for want of a better expression) meanders about and loses itself, and turning the page becomes a chore. It was a blessed relief when the mass of loose ends finally overcame their creator, whose joy at producing the inconsequential end could not have surpassed my own at reaching it.
Just as a footnote, the book seems to lack careful editing and proof-reading. On page 5 the hero (sic) remembers his wife singing "The sun has put his hat on", which makes you wonder what parallel universe he (or rather the author) inhabits. On page 42 "Nina advised againt", on page 74 "He said deferntially...." and on page 152 "...strutting up and down in plimsols..." But maybe the people at Abacus couldn't be bothered either.
Just as a footnote, the book seems to lack careful editing and proof-reading. On page 5 the hero (sic) remembers his wife singing "The sun has put his hat on", which makes you wonder what parallel universe he (or rather the author) inhabits. On page 42 "Nina advised againt", on page 74 "He said deferntially...." and on page 152 "...strutting up and down in plimsols..." But maybe the people at Abacus couldn't be bothered either.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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2 reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Wickedly Clever
4 Aug 2001
Format:Hardcover
Winter Garden, by Ms. Beryl Bainbridge is both an earlier work, and one of her novels I have most enjoyed. Best known for the historically based fiction she has been writing as of late, this work while taking part in a referenced period of recent history is not predicated on a given event.
This is a tale of deception and misdirection from the opening page. A group is making a trip to Brezhnevs Russia. The core is a group of artists who ostensibly are going to travel and meet with their peers in The Soviet Union. Guests are allowed and one is an Admiralty Lawyer who takes the trip to share the company of Nina, and not to Scotland to fish, as he would like those he has left behind to believe. All is well until they board their flight and trifles like seating arrangements emerge as problems. From this point on nothing is as it seems, and the truth is not revealed until presented literally in the closing sentences.
Between the first and final page Ms. Bainbridge assembles a plot worthy of the great Hitchcock himself. In some of her books the Author does not always immediately bring the interest of the reader to a high pitch. She does however keep the reader interested enough, so that as she proceeds bits and pieces are brought to notice, and the more carefully they are noted the faster the trapdoor she drops you through at the end is reached. However this is not to suggest that the fall you finally take is the only one you stand upon. Ms. Bainbridge is brilliant at letting you believe the obvious only to have it dashed as meaningless the solutions you anticipate.
I have read and commented upon most of this Authors work, and while not all are perfect, none disappoint, and all should appeal to a very wide audience.
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful
A FRIGHTFUL LOAD OF OLD TOSH
3 Sep 2008
Format:Paperback
I began reading this with high hopes, based on the extracts of reviews on the back cover which proclaimed "razor sharp", "very funny" and "marvellously deft", but my expectations were soon dashed. The scenario is promising and in the right hands could have been hilarious, but that is not how it pans out. There is virtually no background, and the characters are inadequately described for us to work up much enthusiasm about what happens to them. In fact the author's approach is quite undisciplined, as if it's too much trouble to set the thing down properly. There is no sense of tension or narrative thread, the plot (for want of a better expression) meanders about and loses itself, and turning the page becomes a chore. It was a blessed relief when the mass of loose ends finally overcame their creator, whose joy at producing the inconsequential end could not have surpassed my own at reaching it.
Just as a footnote, the book seems to lack careful editing and proof-reading. On page 5 the hero (sic) remembers his wife singing "The sun has put his hat on", which makes you wonder what parallel universe he (or rather the author) inhabits. On page 42 "Nina advised againt", on page 74 "He said deferntially...." and on page 152 "...strutting up and down in plimsols..." But maybe the people at Abacus couldn't be bothered either.
Just as a footnote, the book seems to lack careful editing and proof-reading. On page 5 the hero (sic) remembers his wife singing "The sun has put his hat on", which makes you wonder what parallel universe he (or rather the author) inhabits. On page 42 "Nina advised againt", on page 74 "He said deferntially...." and on page 152 "...strutting up and down in plimsols..." But maybe the people at Abacus couldn't be bothered either.
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