[QXJ]⇒ Read Billy Liar Penguin Essentials Keith Waterhouse 9780140017830 Books

Billy Liar Penguin Essentials Keith Waterhouse 9780140017830 Books

Download As PDF : Billy Liar Penguin Essentials Keith Waterhouse 9780140017830 Books

Billy Liar Penguin Essentials Keith Waterhouse 9780140017830 Books

"Billy Liar" is a virtuoso performance by John Simm. It's not just the moments when he's voicing multiple characters and making each distinct, it's the moments when Billy slips into a Yorkshire accent as his friend Arthur puts on his own Yorkshire accent, then Billy play-acts a different character with a different accent--and John Simm keeps this all perfectly clear and understandable. In other scenes there are characters imitating American accents, London accents, all while remaining "in character." Simm creates a number of very believable female characters as well
. The book "Billy Liar" is a darker comedy than I expected--poised between kitchen-sink realism of "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" and the blast of fresh air that was the Beatles. As audiobooks go, this is a bravura performance and worth every unabridged minute.


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Billy Liar Penguin Essentials Keith Waterhouse 9780140017830 Books Reviews

The late fifties and sixties saw the rise in Britain of what has been described as the “kitchen sink” school of social realist fiction. These were a group of young writers, mostly from a provincial working-class background, who wrote novels and short stories about provincial working-class life. (There were also “kitchen sink” movements around the same time in the British theatre and cinema and in the visual arts). Several of this group- Stan Barstow, John Braine, David y and Barry Hines- were from Yorkshire. Alan Sillitoe was from the neighbouring county of Nottinghamshire and Ted Lewis, originally from Lancashire, spent most of his life in Lincolnshire, both counties which also border Yorkshire.

Keith Waterhouse was another Yorkshireman and his “Billy Liar”, the novel by which he is probably best remembered, is in some ways typical of the “kitchen sink” school. The action takes place over the course of a single day. Billy Fisher is a young man of 19 living in the Yorkshire town of Stradhoughton. He lives with his parents, with whom he does not really get on, and has a dull job as a clerk with the undertakers firm of Shadrack & Duxbury. He feels himself trapped and frustrated by provincial life and cherishes the idea of escaping to London where he hopes to find work as a comedy writer.

That could be the plot of a typical “kitchen sink” novel; such novels frequently revolved around a young man from a humble background but with dreams of something better. For example, Wilf Cotton, the hero of Barstow’s “Ask Me Tomorrow“, is also a junior white-collar worker with ambitions to become a writer, and it was this idea of aspirations towards a better life which provided Braine with the title of his best-known work, “Room at the Top”. What sets “Billy Liar” apart from such works is that Barstow, Braine and Sillitoe generally treated their heroes seriously; Waterhouse treats Billy as a comic figure.

In the early part of the novel we do have some sympathy with Billy’s predicament. He is clearly a young man of some intelligence and has a way with words which enables him to express his frustrations in some witty and sardonic language. The late fifties were a time when distinctive regional characteristics were starting to disappear, and Stradhoughton is a dull provincial town place which happens to be in Yorkshire but which could equally well be anywhere else in Britain. One of Billy’s betes noires is “Man o’ the Dales”, a local newspaper columnist whose writing celebrates the traditionalist view of Yorkshire as God’s Own County and its people as the salt of the earth, a vision which Billy finds difficult to reconcile with the Stradhoughton he actually knows.

Billy’s father Geoffrey is a comic take on the stereotypical Yorkshire paterfamilias, a stern, irascible self-made businessman from working-class stock who has risen in the world and regards his son as a severe disappointment. (I wondered if Waterhouse had, for satirical purposes, borrowed the name “Geoffrey Fisher” from the then Archbishop of Canterbury). Although he has renamed his firm- he runs a garage- “Geo. Fisher & Son”, he refuses to allow Billy, whom he regards as bone idle, to work for him. Billy’s mother is an equally stereotypical housewife, sharp-tongued and limited in outlook. (The height of her ambitions seems to be having a request read out on the popular radio programme “Housewives’ Choice”). His only other living relative is his half-mad old grandmother, who lives with the family. Billy’s work at Shadrack and Duxbury is dull and unfulfilling.

And yet, as the story progresses, we find ourselves sympathising with Billy less and less. His nickname "Billy Liar” is a well-deserved one, because he finds it difficult to differentiate between truth and fantasy. He spends a lot of the time escaping into a fantasy world in which he is the Prime Minister of the invented country of Ambrosia (named after a brand of tinned rice pudding). Worse than this sort of daydreaming is his compulsive lying. Some of his falsehoods are told to try and avoid the consequences of minor misdemeanours and others to try and cover up previous lies, but most are told for no reason whatsoever, including his tale that his father is a retired naval officer or his attempt to pass off his girlfriend Barbara as his sister. He is also capable of petty dishonesty; tasked at work with mailing advertising calendars to potential customers, he embezzles the postage money and hides the calendars under his bed.

Billy’s love-life is a complicated one. Barbara, sweet-natured but naïve and strait-laced, is one of Billy’s three girlfriends, the others being the hard, brassy and fiery-tempered Rita and the more sympathetic Liz, about the only person who comes close to understanding Billy’s strange personality. Billy, of course, tells lies to his girlfriends, generally with the intention of preventing each of them from finding out about the other two and to cover up the fact that, although he has managed to become engaged to all of them, he only has one ring.

Over the course of a single day, Billy emerges less as the book’s hero than as its anti-hero; he is not really the sort of person anyone would want as a friend, family member, employee, workmate or lover. The story is narrated in the first person, but Billy is a thoroughly unreliable narrator. And, of course, he lies to himself. His story that a golden future as a comedy scriptwriter is based upon very shaky foundations; he has received a rather vague letter of encouragement from a famous comedian, but contrary to what Billy might believe this letter certainly does not amount to an offer of work.

Billy is essentially a comic, satirical take on the “poor-boy-made-good” aspirational heroes of the kitchen sink genre. By the end of the novel we realise that Billy will never make good. He will never even amount to a poor-boy-made-bad like Lewis’s criminal anti-hero Jack Carter. There may be no room at the top for the Billy Fishers of this world, but plenty of room at the bottom. “Billy Liar” is one of the best comic novels of its period, one in which Waterhouse satirises not only the limitations of provincial life but also the conventions of the provincial novel.
Great writing, but I just don't get it. Very British. Very 50's
Remember reading this book in the 60s and it is still outstanding.Shows the angst of young men growing up.Along with A Kind Of Loving I rate this book highly.
Loved the book!
That is what Billy Fisher ruefully tells one of his girlfriends his tombstone epitaph will be, after another one of his tales had been exposed as an elaborate hoax (the one about his father having been the captain of a destroyer and involved in the sinking of the "Graf Spee" before being imprisoned for three years in a POW camp). He says it in an effort to win back a measure of sympathy, not because he is truly contrite.

Billy is about nineteen. He lives with his working class parents and his crotchety grandmother in Stradhoughton (a provincial city in England, apparently modeled after Leeds). He is employed as a clerk for an undertaker, although he does little actual work and, moreover, perversely refuses to carry out some of the simple tasks assigned him. He has three girlfriends and in the course of the one Saturday encompassed by the novel he tells each of them that he is engaged to her. (This causes problems when they run into one another at a club in the evening.) In many ways, Billy is the quintessential loser. But what most distinguishes him is that he always is telling stories. Perhaps it is because of an overheated imagination; perhaps it is due to boredom with a stultifying life; maybe it's because he fancies himself a stand-up comedian; or possibly it is because Billy, at bottom, is a pathological liar.

BILLY LIAR is a clever, interesting novel, but it does not quite cohere. It is strong in capturing the tropes of interpersonal relations, especially clichéd behavior and speech. It supposedly is quite sensitive to Yorkshire dialect, something that I am not really in a position to appreciate. At times it is very funny, although much of the humor is of the snarky, rebellious sort typical of a disaffected nineteen-year-old. (Billy Fisher reminds me a little of Holden Caulfield, although Billy has a much bleaker existence to rebel against.) While often funny, in the end the novel is sad.

BILLY LIAR is now commonly regarded as one of the British novels from the Fifties that realistically portrays the drab and dreary life of the English working class. It, however, does not do so as effectively as does "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" by Alan Sillitoe. Perhaps that is because Keith Waterhouse does not make a strong case for Billy's habitual fabrication being causally related to his socioeconomic environment. Therefore, Billy's problems with the truth (and reality) end up diverting some of the reader's attention away from the plight of the urban working class.
I got this book solely to study the Yorkshire dialect and found it very useful. It's also a nice capsule of pre-counterculture England. It's a fascinating story about a chap who can't get himself straight, largely because he's incapable of the truth. Nice lesson no matter how much you might achieve through deception, in the end all you've done is deceived yourself. As I've said in other reviews, I'm less fond these days of cynical portraits of society, and this is another one.
"Billy Liar" is a virtuoso performance by John Simm. It's not just the moments when he's voicing multiple characters and making each distinct, it's the moments when Billy slips into a Yorkshire accent as his friend Arthur puts on his own Yorkshire accent, then Billy play-acts a different character with a different accent--and John Simm keeps this all perfectly clear and understandable. In other scenes there are characters imitating American accents, London accents, all while remaining "in character." Simm creates a number of very believable female characters as well
. The book "Billy Liar" is a darker comedy than I expected--poised between kitchen-sink realism of "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" and the blast of fresh air that was the Beatles. As audiobooks go, this is a bravura performance and worth every unabridged minute.