Women Betrayed by Men

The Dressmaker by Beryl Bainbridge is the concise, tautly written narrative of a naïve, foolish and deluded young woman who believes she is being wooed by a soldier-boy.  Bainbridge is known for her psychological fiction, dealing with often macabre tales set among the English working classes.  She was five times nominated in the Booker Shortlist.

I so agree with what the novelist Mavis Cheek has to say in her Guardian review:  "Something has happened to novels in the past 40 years - they have got bigger and fatter and, perhaps, more self-consciously and weightily heroic. The lives of ordinary people showing the reader extraordinary things seem to have given way to big issues and big lives and more and more words. When I look at my bookshelves, I can only admire and envy the rows and rows of slim volumes published mostly between the 1950s and 70s: Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, John Wyndham, Iris Murdoch, Jean Rhys, Albert Camus, Edna O'Brien - each a perfectly crafted, fatless, wholly readable yet intellectually beguiling work of fiction. And sitting there, like queens among royals, are the novels of Beryl Bainbridge. Short little books with innocuous titles - A Weekend with Claude, A Quiet Life, Injury Time (surely one of the funniest books ever written), Winter Garden, Sweet William - all of them about 160 pages long. They are spare, sharp and disturbing."

In The Dressmaker the central character, Rita, is being brought up by her aunts, with her father known as Uncle Jack, in the background.  It is set in Liverpool during World War II and like others of Bainbridge's earlier novels is semi-autobiographical.  The story is in part inspired by a relationship that she had with a soldier as a teenager.  What makes The Dressmaker so readable is the author's ability to tell a good story in bleak and funny prose and yet ignorance, repression and narrow-mindedness cannot help but lead to tragedy. The novel was written at the beginning of the 70s, at a time when women were just beginning to break out of the repression, constraints and modest expectations that hitherto been placed upon them.

In Water, Carry Me, Una Moss, orphaned as a child and sent to live with her hard-drinking, blarney-spouting grandfather, manages to grow up sheltered from the violence all around her during the Troubles in a benighted Ireland  . She is vaguely aware of the hushed talk about politics and the cryptic comments her grandfather makes about her parents' accidental death. But, generally speaking, she's a normal, bright student with a circle of mischievous girlfriends, and a healthy obsession with boys. When Una meets Aidan, she is swept off her feet. He is solid and dependable, and he is in love with her. Or so she believes.   But Aidan, to Una's endless sorrow, is not whom she thinks he is. Water,Carry Me is a captivating novel of betrayal, set against the backdrop of contemporary Ireland. Ultimately the author, Thomas Moran, has created a heartbreaking story which even in the final pages the reader believes will come right in the end.