Fifty Nine. Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse (and the next book in the David Bowie Book Club is revealed)
1959, Penguin Books, 187 pages. Written in English, read in English.
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Note: Due to some technical issues (namely David Bowie Book Club’s March book being lost in the mail), I am switching around the previously provided list of books. So the March book is now Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse (reviewed below), the April book will be Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon, and The Coast of Utopia Trilogy by Tom Stoppard will be May’s book (another version of which is hopefully making its way to me by mail as we speak).
Billy Liar is another member of a worrying genre of books that I happen to encounter more frequently than I would like to — that of novels providing catharsis by following a protagonist who is either rebelling against everything that a “normal” person in his stature would do, in which case we squirm at the audacity and at the troubling storm cloud this person must be heading into; or — as the case is here — a protagonist who is unable, or unwilling, to make any progress and achieve any kind of success, in which case we squirm at the protagonist’s inability to get, or strive for, a single break. The catharsis in question is of the “luckily it’s not me” sort, but it’s still not a pleasant type of book to read, at least not in my opinion.
The namesake of the book is Billy Fisher, a young man in a Yorkshire town who has apparently recently finished his educational and matriculatory commitments, and who is beginning on the first steps of a career — or a job, at least. He wants to be a comedian, or more specifically, he wants to write jokes for a famous comedian, and propelled by an non-committal suggestion of employment from said famous comedian, the story follows him on a single Saturday as his carefully convoluted life falls apart in pursuit of that future in London. Within that convoluted life there is a family that he detests, three girlfriends, two of which are actually fiancees, a job as an undertaker’s clerk that he dislikes with a boss that he hates, a friend who is envious of his planned success and a rival who will do everything to make his life miserable. As it appears to happen with a lot of similar British novels of that era, the whole point of the book is that Billy ends up pretty much where he started, and so are we.
June’s book in the David Bowie Book Club is going to be Money by Martin Amis — and as mail appears to be slower these days, I will also provide July’s book, which will be The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.
