Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #69194 in Books
• Published on: 1973-06-28
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Synopsis
When Keith Waterhouse?s comic novel Billy Liar was first published in 1959, rave reviews compared it to Kingsley Amis? Lucky Jim, Colin MacInnes?s Absolute Beginners, Salinger?s Catcher in the Rye, and other ?youth cult novels.? Billy Liar is a regional comedy about a youth who attempts to escape his dull family life through fantasy.

Customer Reviews

Great teenagers book
I read this first when I was about thirteen and loved it although at the time I didn't really appreciate just how bitter sweet this book really is. It's packed with laugh aloud moments and I adored his descriptions of his parents, particularly his mother's 'motherisms' Coming back to it as an adult it is still very, very funny but much more poignant with the benefit of a bit of wisdom and hindsight. There is a sequel Billy Liar On The Moon but it lacks the innocence of the original. Billy Liar is also a great stage play and fab 1960's film.

A Boy Hiding in Disguises
Still fresh after 45 years, Waterhouse's novel about a compulsive liar who can't handle reality is funny, sweet, and heartbreakingly sad. Set at the tail end of 1950s, the story is told by Billy Fisher, who lives with his parents in the fictional Yorkshire town of Stradhoughton. Billy can't cope with his tedious clerking job at a local funeral parlor, living at home, or really anything about his life, and so, spends a great deal of time escaping into fantasy world in his head called Ambrosia. When he's not imagining life as prime minister of his make-believe country, he's spinning mostly purposeless lies to almost everyone he meets. Sometimes he's lying to cover up real misdeeds, such as his smalltime embezzling, other times, his lies are completely pointless, such as telling a friend's mother about his fictional sister.

At first, his carefree, devil-may-care insouciance is amusing and the reader is drawn into Billy's bizarre self-vision as lively raconteur and comic wit. However, as the story progresses, he becomes a more troublesome figure. He's engaged to two different girls, and apparently in love with a third. More problematically, he has no emotional connection to realityóevery episode in his life takes on the aspect of a sketch or scene in which he struggles to determine what role to play, what accent to adopt, or what pose to strike. It becomes heartbreaking to witness Billy's belief that he's smarter than everyone around him and destined for great things, when everyone else can see right through his poses and tired routines. (It'd be interesting to know what a psychiatrist's diagnosis of Billy would be.) As the lies pile up, Billy finds himself painted into a corner from which only drastic action will free him. His only avenue of escape is to actually pursue his longstanding claim of a job offer in London writing scripts for a standup comic. The reader is torn between wanting Billy to stay and face up to his misdeeds, and wanting him to get on that train to the Big Smoke and realize his dreams. Of course, the outcome is inevitable.

Waterhouse grew up in Leeds, and like Billy, worked as a clerk in an undertakers. The prose is liberally sprinkled with Yorkshire dialect, and does a brilliant job of capturing the small town atmosphere, from the grubby disco, to the local cafe, and claustrophobic house. The book was turned into a play the year after publication and into an excellent film several years later, a TV miniseries in the early 1970s, and an insipid American TV series called Billy. A sequel called Billy Liar on The Moon appeared in 1977, and more recently there are allegedly plans for an American feature film remake, although I'm not sure who thought that would be a good idea..

A book for dreamers and dodgers of reality !!
Written in the first person, Billy Liar is a tale of pure escapism. Billy Fisher - a child in an adults body - is torn between his daydreams in his make believe nation of Ambrosia - and the harsh realities of life in a non-descript Yorkshire town of the 1950's. His inability to apply himself to all those things his peers expect of him, and to adherr to the tasteless lifestyle that those around him take for granted, force him to invent, and emerse himself in, his own realities to rationalise away the problems and obstacles he faces in life - his best weapon in this pursuit being his lies. Pretty soon he becomes tangled in the ever spiralling webs of deceit he spins to maintain three engagements, an illusory brother and sister, and mounting problems at Shadrack and Duxbury funeral homes his place of work and constant source of unease. Billy's descriptions of the everyday people around him and their everday lives are razor sharp - not least of all his parents and grandmother so predictable in their breakfast table conversation that those scenes appear to Billy as perverse scethches from a bad soap opera, painfully drawn out through the same dialogues each morning. Billy is a hypochondriac and obsessive, yet eternally optimistic without good cause and darkly comic in his appraisal of the world around him and its inhabitants. This is the kind of book you'll either love or hate depending on whether there is any Billy Liar in you, and whether you ever escape to your own Ambrosia.