Unfolding the hang-ups

Press, 2 July 1983, Page 18

Unfolding the hang-ups

A Weekend with Claude. By Beryl Bainbridge. Collins/Fontana, 1983. 152 pp. $4.95 (paperback).

(Reviewed by

Diane Prout)

Beryl Bainbridge is a devastatingly brilliant creator of weak, comic and ineffectual characters whose failure to achieve their high-minded artistic aspirations and sexually fulfilling relationships is due, in part, to blocked drains, gas meters which give up the ghost, and sheer physical ineptitude. Her formula is simple. Take a group of incongruously assorted misfits, confine them at close quarters, supply a generous amount of liquor, and let the hang-ups unfold. Shebah, the decayed Jewess, who has known the splendour in the grass and glory in the flower, comments wryly, on her fellow travellers: “It’s as if all this fascination with sex builds a big wall between the devotees and the non-devotees. If you aren’t a participant there’s simply so much that’s incomprehensible. They pretend to be interested in art and politics and books and they seem to chat quite intelligently for a time, but always, like a maggot eating its way across a particularly decayed and juicy fruit, there’s this sexual business, leaving a small trail of slime, and nothing seems really to bring them to life.” Claude, antique dealer and host of the week-end in question, has taken unto himself a mistress, Julia, following his wife’s desertion. Bespectacled and lady-like, she in turn is politely at pains to resist the amorous advances of Victorian Norman, whose apparent nineteenth-

century rectitude belies his lecherous designs. Lily, who lives life through emotional excesses, fails to convince Edward that he is the father of her child (a pity because she tries so hard to be nice!). The hopeless entanglements, culminating in Claude’s shooting Shebah in the leg — accidentally? — are unfolded through a photograph taken during the week-end with Claude. Two customers, who have satisfactorily purchased one of Claude’s precious antiques, are attracted to the memento of that distant, seemingly idyllic two days. By an ironic counterpointing of individual points of view, the comic drama is unfolded. Art and reality have little in common. Beryl Bainbridge is an elegant and acute observer of human frailty and folly, as well as a superb craftsman of her art.