Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2724188 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 4
• Binding: Audio CD

Review
"Bainbridge is a genuine original, with a macabre imagination and a wonderful gift for catching tones of speech."

Customer Reviews

BOTTLING OUT
Whatever this story might be thought to lack, it's not originality. Bottling wine out of imported casks and labelling the bottles in an Italian-owned plant in London is presumably a mechanised operation these days. However time was when people did these jobs, and they were real people with real hearts and souls like the rest of us.

These are `small' people with `small' lives. The hopes and aspirations of the two leading characters are small. Neither they nor anyone else in the story mean any harm to anyone, and nobody does anything particularly `wrong'. Death touches one of the little group on their little works outing to Windsor in the rain, and the thing that makes the whole tale so terribly sad is that they can all get away with their grotesque obsequies for her - nobody else will ever know she is dead.

How easy you will find the book to read I can't say. By the standards of modern novels it is short, the style of writing is the opposite of flamboyant or elaborate, and you may have to keep reminding yourself who is who until you are well into the plot. The characters are differentiated well enough, I suppose, but what they all do say and think is within a very restricted range, and that just goes with the territory.

I found it, genuinely, deeply touching. Death the great leveller is cheated of his levelling at least to the extent that his victim's send-off is unusual in the extreme. If the rest of them can hold their tongues nobody will learn of her death because more or less nobody else knew she was alive. How many leave our society unnoticed, I wonder, without either such a unique funeral or such a gifted narrator to bring us their story.

Legs
A wrist rolls the ruby red liquid of the fermented grape, and then pauses, and the glass is watched. For wine does not indiscriminately settle in a glass like lesser liquids. It falls in lines, and by these lines the spirit is partially judged, its legs are appraised.

I have read enough of Ms. Beryl Bainbridge's writing to state comfortably that there is probably no topic that she cannot spin a great tale from. "The Bottle Factory Outing", is above all else about people, which is in keeping with the author's previous work. The primary characters are two women that while they share the same bed, with an impenetrable wall of pillows between them, could not be more different. One is passive, almost a victim, desiring more not to upset her day-to-day existence than to stand up for herself. The other is a warrior defending not only what she perceives as her territory, but any turf that may catch her eye as well. The former may be an unsure individual; however she does not delude herself. The latter has confidence that causes her to believe that which she wants despite any reality she witnesses.

The book is unique as it has more than one instance when the story could reasonably end. The story is in no way overextended, just marvelously structured. The event of course is the employee outing and all that takes place from the early morning start, to a surrealistic second act, and finally the disturbing close of the third. Personalities that have become familiar do not conduct themselves in keeping with the book's start. Honor, which is repeatedly called upon to justify, draw or inflict guilt, becomes many things other than an honorable trait. And finally some of the worst traits of humanity do not begin and end with a single act, but are repeatedly compounded by a rationalized conspiracy.

If you have never read this writer's work, you most probably have missed enjoying a wonderfully talented mind. You may pick a work of hers at random and not be disappointed.

And the next time you raise a glass of wine, I guaranty you will think of this book.