Product Description

When Master Georgie - George Hardy, surgeon and photographer - sets off from the cold squalor of Victorian Liverpool for the heat and glitter of the Bosphorus to offer his services in the Crimea, there straggles behind him a small caravan of devoted followers; Myrtle, his adoring adoptive sister; lapsed geologist Dr Potter; and photographer's assistant and sometime fire-eater Pompey Jones, all of them driven onwards through a rising tide of death and disease by a shared and mysterious guilt. Combining a breathtaking eye for beauty with a visceral understanding of mortality, Beryl Bainbridge exposes her enigmatic hero as tenderly and unsparingly as she reveals the filth and misery of war, and creates a novel of luminous depth and extraordinary intensity.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #161768 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Beryl Bainbridge seems drawn to disaster. First she tackled the Unfortunate Scott expedition to the South Pole in The Birthday Boys; later (but emphatically pre-DiCaprio) came the sinking of the Titanic, in Every Man for Himself. Now, in her third historical novel (and her 16th overall), she takes on the Crimean War, and the result is a slim, gripping volume with all of the doomed intensity of the Light Brigade's charge--but, thankfully, without the Tennysonian bombast. "Some pictures," a character confides, "would only cause alarm to ordinary folk." There's a warning concealed here, and one that easily disturbed readers would do well to heed: Master Georgie is intense, disturbing, revelatory--and not always pretty to look at.

Bainbridge's narrative circles around the enigmatic figure of George Hardy, a surgeon, amateur photographer, alcoholic and repressed homosexual who counters the dissipation of his prosperous Liverpool life by heading for the Crimean Peninsula in 1854. His journey and subsequent tour of duty are told in three very different voices: Myrtle, an orphan whose lifelong loyalty to her "Master Georgie" becomes an overriding obsession; Pompey Jones, street urchin, fire-eater, photographer and George's sometime lover; and Dr. Potter, George's scholarly brother-in-law, whose retreat from the war's carnage and into books takes on a tinge of madness.

United by a sudden death in a Liverpool brothel in 1846, these characters plumb the curious workings of love, war, class and fate. In between, Bainbridge frames an unforgettable series of tableaux morts: a dying soldier, one lens of his glasses "fractured into a spider's web"; a decapitated leg, toes "poking through the shreds of a cavalry boot"; two dead men "on their knees, facing one another, propped up by the pat-a-cake thrust of their hands." Glimpsed as if sideways and then passed over in language that is as understated as it is lovely, these are images that sear into the brain. Master Georgie is full of such moments, horrors painted with an exquisite brush. --Mary Park

Review
'It is hard to think of anyone now writing who understands the human heart as Beryl Bainbridge does' THE TIMES 'Another masterly exploration by an author at the peak of her form ...She was always good at funny dialogue and acute observation of the oddities of human behaviour, but her recent historical explorations have given full reign to her startling powers of description ... Bainbridge has never written better' DAILY TELEGRAPH

THE TIMES
'It is hard to think of anyone now writing who understands the human heart as [Beryl Bainbridge] does'

Customer Reviews

Sensitive, moving story about love and loss
The idea of writing this novel about a character, George Hardy, but confining its “voice” to the three people most close to him gives George, the person, an almost mystical air and at the same time is a very good device to reveal snippets of his life as the story progresses.
The three narrators are, predictably, very different and the events they describe often clash amusingly. Myrtle is the most reverential to George and it is through her voice we perceive the sensitivity of Bainbridge’s story- she is also the most sympathetic. Dr Potter provides the humour (at his own expense) that lightens an otherwise bleak situation. Finally, Pompey Jones is similar to Myrtle in his devotion but almost her rival in love- he also provides the first hand account of the battle scenes at the end of the book which are unfortunately the least interesting or polished part of the book.
Bainbridge infuses the book with ambiguities of sexuality that sit beside the harshness of the war very well. What is interesting is the amount of gore and unpleasantness that permeates the supposedly “prim” Victorian values of the characters.
By far superior to Every Man For Himself and deserves its Booker Prize nomination. The length of MG was a disappointment; however, at only just over two hundred pages long I felt it didn’t develop its characters as well as it could- especially having three different narrators. Also the conflict near the end didn’t have the dramatic tension or interest I thought it should. A fine novel but much too short.

A True Test For Humanity - Master Georgie
Beryl Bainbridge's novel Master Georgie is a fascinating insight into the Crimean war and the complex relationships of human beings. Written from differing persepectives, Bainbridge draws on the idea that all experiences are unique, and highlights differing techniques for dealing with extremes of human suffering.

Master Georgie, doctor and medical photographer, has a tremendous hold over all characters in the novel - so much so that they travel to accompany the doctor in his war efforts. Myrtle is besotted with George and vows never to leave his side, despite his obvious lack of interest in women. Bainbridge infers that he prefers the attentions of Pompey Jones, a photographer with whom he is having an implied homosexual relationship. Dr Potter seems to have the least tie to George, but is probably the most endearing character in the novel.

An ageing academic, Dr Potter avoids the personal trauma he is experiencing to think about his wife. He is a man of learning and an avid philosopher, who is used to dealing with situations rationally. War to Dr. Potter is merely unorganised chaos. When the group are ordered on to different locations, Dr. Potter's interest in geography takes over, and he takes in the scenery - his intellect is often his saviour. But Potter is a complex character. His coping mechanism tends to be to create humour out of potentially life-threatening situations. He admits that life is nothing without reading books and lying close to his wife. Potter's sentimentality is his downfall, and he sinks further into disarray by the end of the novel.

The novel is of interest as it deals with the stark clarity of the war situation and juxtaposes the ambiguity of relationships. It is most fascinating for the way in which different characters engage with the trauma surrounding them. An interesting comparison is Barker's novel, Regeneration, which deals with psychological and mental repercussions of war. A really good read.

Complex, moving, beautifully cratfed
At first glance Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge suggests it might be quite a light book, an easy read, a period piece set in the mid-nineteenth century. This would be wrong. Master Georgie is no safe tale of country house manners, of marriages imagined by confined, embroidering young women. Beryl Bainbridge's Master Georgie is anything but a tale of such saccharine gentility.

Master Georgie is a surgeon and photographer, and the book is cast in six plates - photographic plates, not chapters. Death figures throughout. From start to finish morbidity crashes into the lives of the book's characters. We begin with Mr Moody, dead in a brothel bed, his host of minutes before in shock. Later we move to the Crimean War, where the carnage is graphic, extensive and apparently random. And even then individuals find their own personal ways of adding insult and injury to the suffering.

The book uses multiple points of view. We see things Master Georgie's way. Myrtle, an orphan he takes in, adds her perspective. The fussy geologist, Dr Potter, imprints his own version of reality. And still there are less than explained undercurrents, undeclared motives which affect them all. Thus, overall, Master Georgie is a complex and ambitious novel. Though it is set in a major war, the backdrop is never allowed to dominate. The characters experience the consequences of conflict and register their reactions, but we are never led by the nose trough the history or the geography of the setting.

But we also never really get to know these people. Myrtle, perhaps, has the strongest presence. She has a slightly jaundiced, certainly pragmatic approach to life. But even she finds the privations of wartime tough. Why the characters of Master Georgie are all so keen to offer themselves as support for the war effort is an aspect of the book that never fully revealed itself. And ultimately this was my criticism of Beryl Bainbridge's book. While the overall experience was both rewarding and not a little shocking, I found there was insufficient delineation between the characters and their differing motives. The beauty of the prose, however, more than made up for any shortcoming. The language created the mixed world of mid-nineteenth century politeness and juxtaposed this with the visceral vulgarities of soldiering and the general struggle of life. This rendered Master Georgie a complex, moving and quite beautiful book.