Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #258204 in Books
• Published on: 1984-02-23
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Synopsis
National Service: two years of square-bashing, kit layout, shepherd's pie 'made from real shepherds', PT and drill, relieved only by the occasional lecture on VD. Conscription has made Jonathan Browne and Mike 'Ginger' Brady prisoners of the British Army. But reckless, impulsive Mike and pragmatic Jonathan adopt radically different attitudes to this two-year confiscation of their freedom. Where Jonathan chooses to keep his head down, Mike can't help but rebel against those in charge. Then one day Mike goes too far, with consequences that threaten to overturn Jonathan's cultivated detachment from the idiocies of military life...

Customer Reviews

ho hum, David Lodge does Spike Milligan.
I would have much preferred Spike Milligan does David Lodge.
Dreary memoirs of national service. Lodge would be much better to stick to his heftier work, I'm afraid his humour does not fit the 'comedy book' genre and his intellect is lost in it.
Poor considering his normal quality.

Serious comedy
Ginger You're Barmy is an entertaining romp with an edge of horror about national service after the war. Our rather clever and reserved narrator, Jonathan Browne, makes friends with the much more wayward Mike 'Ginger' Brady of the title. Both went to university but whilst our narrator got a first class degree, Ginger left without one at all. The book describes their adventures whilst doing their service at Bovington with surprisingly dramatic consequences. Like other books about the military and war, such as Catch 22, the tone is essentially comic in a farcical way but, like Catch 22, there is an underlying horror that the reader is unable to escape. The farce about the military often turns out to be a very brutal type of farce; the harshness of the army routine unecessarily oppressive, and ridiculous because of it. Now, after Monty Python and in the comfort of 60 years of peace, we have become accustomed to laughing at officious Sergeant Majors and their ilk but when Lodge wrote this in the late '50's/early '60's it was against a quite different backdrop. It also reveals a character type characteristic at the time due to other writers like John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe - 'the angry young man'and his confrontations with authority. It succeeds as a book in being both funny, critical and disturbing. I enjoyed it a great deal and would reccomend it.