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...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #193665 in Books
• Published on: 2003-12-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
'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

About the Author
Beryl Bainbridge is one of the greatest living novelists. Author of seventeen novels, two travel books and five plays for stage and television, she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, and has won many literary awards including the Whitbread Prize and the Author of the Year Award at the British Book Awards.

Customer Reviews

a comic masterpiece
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.

A FRIGHTFUL LOAD OF OLD TOSH
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.