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    The Bottle Factory Outing: A Novel
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    The Bottle Factory Outing: A Novel
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    The Bottle Factory Outing: A Novel
    Ebook214 pages3 hours

    The Bottle Factory Outing: A Novel

    By Beryl Bainbridge

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Named by the Observer as “one of the 100 greatest novels of all time,” this dark comedy with a disturbing twist follows two working-class women in 1970s London.

    Unlikely friends Brenda and Freda share a rundown room in London and toil away at an Italian factory pasting labels onto wine bottles. Brenda, a shy and passive thirty-three-year-old brunette, recently ran away to the city to escape an abusive husband. Freda, meanwhile, is a rebellious twenty-six-year-old blonde with big dreams and a penchant for bossing people around.
     
    The two women are the only English workers at the bottling facility, and their presence certainly stirs up trouble. Freda has a crush on the trainee manager, Vittorio, and tries to get close to him despite the fact that he’s engaged to an Italian girl. Brenda, on the other hand, spends a fair amount of time trying to distance herself from the advances of the factory’s manager, Mr. Rossi.
     
    When Freda organizes a company outing, what’s supposed to be a day of freedom and fun turns into a dark and chaotic tragedy. The workers plan to travel by van to a stately castle, where they will picnic and drink wine before visiting an African safari. But the van never shows up, and when they finally do make it to the castle, something goes fatally wrong.
     
    Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, The Bottle Factory Outing was inspired by author Beryl Bainbridge’s own experiences working as a cellar girl in the mid-twentieth century. Intertwining themes of loneliness and friendship, sexual frustration and personal power, passion and murder, this tragicomedy is a British classic that depicts working-class life as something both terribly morose and wickedly funny.
     
    This ebook features an illustrated biography of Beryl Bainbridge including rare images from the author’s estate.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateOct 4, 2016
    ISBN9781504039390
    Unavailable
    The Bottle Factory Outing: A Novel
    Author

    Beryl Bainbridge

    Dame Beryl Bainbridge (1932–2010) is acknowledged as one of the greatest British novelists of her time. She was the author of two travel books, five plays, and seventeen novels, five of which were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, including Master Georgie, which went on to win the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the WHSmith Literary Award. She was also awarded the Whitbread Literary Award twice, for Injury Time and Every Man for Himself. In 2011, a special Man Booker “Best of Beryl” Prize was awarded in her honor, voted for by members of the public.   Born in Liverpool and raised in nearby Formby, Bainbridge spent her early years working as an actress, leaving the theater to have her first child. Her first novel, Harriet Said . . ., was written around this time, although it was rejected by several publishers who found it “indecent.” Her first published works were Another Part of the Wood and An Awfully Big Adventure, and many of her early novels retell her Liverpudlian childhood. A number of her books have been adapted for the screen, most notably An Awfully Big Adventure, which is set in provincial theater and was made into a film by Mike Newell, starring Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant. She later turned to more historical themes, such as the Scott Expedition in The Birthday Boys, a retelling of the Titanic story in Every Man for Himself, and Master Georgie, which follows Liverpudlians during the Crimean War. Her no-word-wasted style and tight plotting have won her critical acclaim and a committed following. Bainbridge regularly contributed articles and reviews to the Guardian, Observer, and Spectator, among others, and she was the Oldie’s longstanding theater critic. In 2008, she appeared at number twenty-six in a list of the fifty most important novelists since 1945 compiled by the Times (London). At the time of her death, Bainbridge was working on a new novel, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, which was published posthumously.  

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    Reviews for The Bottle Factory Outing

    3.5/5

    125 ratings15 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Brilliant black humour. Loved this.
    • 4/5
      So funny and yet so painful!
    • 3/5
      A very creepy black comedy. Bainbridge effectively builds up suspense in the first half; the second half is a bit of a letdown.
    • 3/5
      A very weird book. Up until the main event of the story it is farcical, funny but afterwards it is no longer clear whether it is meant to be funny or not. I haven't got a clue, it is a crazy tale.
    • 4/5
      A very, very dark comedy that takes place in the dull, grey middle-to-lower class England of the nineteen seventies. Bainbridge's real accomplishment here is her creation of the novel's two main characters: Freda and Joanna. The the first a willful, dramatic, and perhaps not particularly likable theatrical hanger-on, the second one of those passive, introverted, insecure women that many people would probably forget after meeting. The fact that the author doesn't turn Freda into a women's-movement caricature and makes Joanna register as a real character in her own right is really a testament to her skill as a writer: I get the feeling that their characters would have been a mishandled by a less talented writer. Here, they come off as real people, and one is forced to take their aspirations, ridiculous and unlikely as they sometimes are, seriously. Everything, including the outing that gives the novel its title, ends both tragically and farcically for everyone involved, though Bainbridge's interest in theater does show through: two of the book's extended episodes slowly and inexorably devolve to high comic absurdity without seeming overwrought or unrealistic. Well-constructed and funny, if ultimately despairing and genuinely somber, this one's specially recommended to anglophiles and fans of half-forgotten BBC comedy series.
    • 2/5
      i can't imagine why it was shortlisted for the Booker.
    • 4/5
      Chose this one from the 1000 Guardian novels to read before you die, the comedy section. This is definitely a comedy, but a black one - yes as Greene says there is horror in this book, within the comedy - if you have ever suffered in your life then you will see the horror. However the comedy is the key thing and the good news is that Bainbridge lets the characters and the plots develop the comedy naturally and the laughs never feel forced. In turns hilarious and also disturbing, well worth a weekend read.
    • 3/5
      Beryl Bainbridge made it to the Man Booker prize shortlist a record five times but never succeeded in winning the award. The Bottle Factory Outing, her fourth novel was one of the shortlisted titles in 1974 but was beaten to the prize by Stanley Middleton's Holiday. Bainbridge's story is set in a small Italian-run factory somewhere in London which bottles wines and some spirits. Freda and Brenda are two members of the workforce , working alongside some middle aged Italians who clean and label the bottles for despatch. The pair share a workbench by day and a miserable bedsit room by night. They also share a bed though they build a wall of books to ensure there is a clear demarkation of space on the mattress. They are an unlikely pair of women to hitch up together. They have little in common either in their backgrounds or their attitudes to life.Freda is one of those people who seem born with a bigger pair of lungs than the average human being. Loud and fearless, she has aspirations to be an actress or, failing that, to marry someone rich. Brenda is her complete opposite, dark haired and completely passive, the kind of girl that will never say no to anyone in case they are offended. Her one moment of bravery it seems was to leave her husband, a drunkard much prone to urinating on the doorstep of their home in the north of England and to set up alone in London.Freda is a girl with dreams. She comes up with a plan for the entire team to take off for a day out in country. It will, she hopes, give her the opportunity to capture the heart of the manager, Vittorio. Brenda has more pressing concerns - how to avoid the amorous intentions of her fellow worker, the lecherous Rossi.Their day of freedom fails to live up to all their expectations. It's starts with the non appearance of the van they'd booked as transport and gets steadily worse because instead of a wine-fuelled picnic in the grounds of a stately home, they have to enjoy their repast on a patch of grass near the road. It all ends in in tragedy.The Bottle Factory Outing is a novel inspired by Bainbridge's own experience of working in a bottling plant. At times offbeat, the humour is mingled with moments of poignancy particularly in the final scenes as the workers gather at a bizarre party in the factory attic.The front cover blurb says Grahame Greene considered The Bottle Factory Outing to be 'outrageously funny and horrifying.' Funny yes with some scenes that are pure farce but I couldn't find anything remotely 'horrifying' within these pages. It struck me rather as a story that ripples with pathos. All the workers in this factory have dreams that sustain them through their mundane lives; they long for something to relieve that monotony but ultimately those wishes and desires come to nothing. I enjoyed Bainbridge's economic style of writing and warmed to these two women but the novel ultimately failed to live up to its promise. The black humour and the poignancy ultimately became as unlikely a pairing as Freda and Brenda.
    • 3/5
      Very English black comedy, the sort of book in which social embarrassment can be more serious in its consequences than violent death. Slight and insubstantial at first sight, but when you start to look at it more closely, there are some very penetrating little insights into the bizarre way the English still thought in the 1970s (like Brenda having been taught as a middle-class child that "it was rude to say no, unless she didn't mean it"). I loved the "Nelson touch" in the ending, too. But it does feel more like a screenplay for a Willy Russell film than a novel (in the event, it was Alan Plater who adapted it for the screen, of course).This was one of the five Beryl Bainbridge books that got on to the Booker shortlist at different times, without ever winning: this one lost out to Stanley Middleton and Nadine Gordimer (who shared the 1974 prize).
    • 5/5
      This is an odd book, but I found it captivating. I can't imagine it would be everybodies' poison, but I found it creepily fascinating
    • 4/5
      Very dated but a good read nonetheless. A glimpse into a time long past when men and women had very different roles and outlooks, no modern stuff to distract or validate themselves. Dare I say it that people seemed to talk to each other and tolerate each other a bit more?

      A great little story that reveals more of the era as it opens out. There is nothing deep or hidden here it is just a great story and character study.
    • 2/5
      The author shovels dreary characters onto dreary jobs in a dreary setting without giving them the slightest awareness that might save them from any normal indignity, but what happens is not just normal and the black humor of the resulting scramble is at least more lively than the earlier narrative.
    • 4/5
      The book is the first by Bainbridge I have read. It was billed as humorous and it is but it is all black comedy. Brenda irritated me a little with her passiveness but Freda was magnificent!
    • 3/5
      Friends Freda and Brenda are living together in a small flat and working in a wine bottling factory in North London in the 1970s. Their work consists of applying labels to wine bottles. Freda is single, outgoing, and assertive. Brenda is separated from her husband. She is an introvert who tries to get along with everyone. The factory owners are Italian. The majority of the workers are Italian immigrants, plus one Irishman. Freda is seeking to develop a romance with the factory owner’s son. Brenda must fend off advances from one of the (married) factory managers. The main event is a picnic for the workers. When this outing finally occurs, it takes a tragic turn.

      This story is a combination of gallows humor, sexism, and classism. The characters and settings are well drawn. The prose is elegant. Primary themes are loneliness, power, and fears of immigrants at being blamed for whatever has gone wrong. It was published in 1974 and nominated for the Booker Prize. Dark humor is obviously going to be appreciated by some readers more than others. I enjoyed the writing style and plan to read more from this author.
    • 4/5
      The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge peels back the covers and takes an in-depth look at the lives of two very different women who happen to share lodgings and work together at a wine bottling factory in London during the 1970s. I can’t say that I liked or identified with either woman as Brenda was very shy, afraid to speak up for herself and constantly casts herself in the victim role, she also has trouble both telling and facing up to the plain truth. Loud and brassy Freda, on the other hand, is bossy, lives on the dreams in her head, bullies Brenda and likes to be in control at all times. As the story opens Freda has planned an outing for all the employees at the factory. Brenda is dreading the outing hoping she can avoid the lecherous advances of Rossi, the manager, while Freda, sees this as an opportunity to further her plans to snare the bosses’ nephew, Vittorio. Things take a dark twist on the outing which to my mind changed the book from a farcical romp to more of a black comedy. I should probably point out here that many people fail to see the funny side of this book, so perhaps it only appeals to those of us who like to snicker at inappropriate times. What a strange book. Highly readable, both funny and painful in equal measure. The author exhibits an acidic tongue as she describes the dynamics of the love/hate relationship that these two women share. From broken toilets to a tea leaf reading, seductions in the cellar and a trip to Winsor Castle, it was amazing how much story the author was able to pack into a book of less than 200 pages. The Bottle Factory Outing was a read that I really enjoyed, it’s grim, gritty and yes, made me giggle a time or two as well.