Daunt Books is doing a fine job in reissuing Beryl Bainbridge’s novels, all with new forewords (this one’s from Yiyun Li), and ‘An Awfully Big Adventure’ is one of her finest. Set in a drab, post-war 1950s Liverpool, the story follows fifteen-year-old Stella Bradshaw, an awkward girl living with her step-parents, who is taken on as an assistant stage manager for a local theatre troupe. Swept up in the shabby, nicotine-stained allure of the Liverpool Repertory Company, the naive Stella becomes fixated on the aloof, enigmatic director Meredith Potter. She is also drawn into a ruinous entanglement with PJ O’Hara, a weary actor playing Captain Hook in the theatre’s production of ‘Peter Pan’. This triggers a dark web of adult deception and compromise. Bainbridge masterfully balances macabre tragedy with pitch-black, deadpan comedy—it’s one of her real, laugh-out-loud books. And Liverpool—damp, bomb-pocked, and stifling—is virtually a character in itself, the location serving as a bleakly funny counterpoint to the fragile magic that’s supposed to be taking place on stage. Stella herself is a magnificent creation—funny and odd, yet deeply disturbed, repeatedly disappearing into a telephone box just to hear a ringing tone and some connection to the wider world. It’s through Stella’s passive, uncomprehending drift into the adult sphere that Bainbridge ruthlessly dismantles romanticised notions of both love’s young dream and the theatre. The novel was made into a so-so film in 1995, but if you want the razor-sharp, darkly hilarious, and completely unsentimental take on the tale, then you need to turn to Bainbridge’s masterclass in Northern gothic realism. RM

Published by Daunt Books