The Birthday Boys - Softcover

Bainbridge, Beryl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349121567 ISBN 13: 9780349121567

Publisher: Abacus, 2009

Synopsis

This extraordinary account of Captain Scott's tragically ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic, achieves the apparently impossible: Beryl Bainbridge's powers of expression and ability to evoke an emotion or perception with almost tangible force are displayed to a hitherto unseen degree. Deploying her extraordinary imagination to the task of recreating the inner lives and outer trials of Scott and his team, Bainbridge gives us a study in the nature and action of charisma and in the place of duty and aspiration in all our lives.

About this title

From AudioFile:

Beryl Bainbridge's historical fiction should be required reading. Her complex portraits of people and events allow us to experience the possibilities of the past. In this novel, we view Robert Scott's 1912 Antarctic expedition through her incomparable lens. For her facts, she draws upon actual letters, journal accounts, and the memoirs of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the survivors. Gordon Griffin's performance is masterful. His characterizations imply confusion in the seemingly self-assured and bravery in unlikely heroes. These explorers harbor petty jealousies yet offer the potential for courageous acts. Griffin presents them with little sentimentality, boisterous enthusiasm,and the distinct sense of children boasting. Bainbridge's mono-logues expose ingrained prejudices and class distinctions, casting light on the shadows found even in good men's souls. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Publishers Weekly:

Bainbridge, the idiosyncratic English author whose best-known books here are probably The Bottle Factory Outing and The Dressmaker , has never gained the American audience she deserves. The fact that this gripping, moving and hair-raisingly readable novel has taken three years to achieve publication here--and then only by a courageous and enterprising smaller publisher--suggests that Americans are still slightly wary of her. Readers should abandon such caution immediately, for this is by far her best book to date: a riveting account told in shifting first-person narratives by the key members of the doomed Antarctic expedition led by Captain Scott in 1912. It has been written about often before, and memorably filmed, but Bainbridge's cunningly fictionalized account leaves others standing. She takes on, in turn, the voices of burly, roistering Welsh Petty Officer Taff Evans; sweet-natured, scholarly, all-forgiving Dr. Edward (Uncle Bill) Wilson; Captain Robert Falcon Scott himself, a memorably complex man with a strong gift for command overlying deep inner fears and anxieties; Lieut. Henry (Birdie) Bowers, an endlessly energetic, curious, squat adventurer who has roved the world's perilous places alone; and aloof, sardonic, aristocratic Capt. Lawrence (Titus) Oates, a rich man beginning to realize his essential humanity in the months before his death. Every Englishman knows the agonizing end of their story, only hinted at in the book by a schoolgirl's map of their final death march back from the South Pole after being beaten there by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. A whole lost era of fantastic courage, determination, idealism, curiosity, boyish foolishness and class mores is brought brilliantly and touchingly back by Bainbridge's penetrating psychological acumen and her superb scene and action painting. The beauty and horror of the desolate landscapes, the painful limits of human endurance and bravery, are unforgettably caught in prose that is as swift, cool and clear as ice melt. A masterly achievement, not to be missed by anyone who cherishes a strong, meaningful story beautifully told.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Abacus
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0349121567
• ISBN 13: 9780349121567
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192