Keith Waterhouse. Billy Liar (1959)

     Keith Waterhouse. Billy Liar (1959) The blurbs claim this is funny, light-hearted, etc. I find it sad. Billy Fisher is the only son of a dysfunctional working class family somewhere in Yorkshire. He fantasises constantly about an alternative family, or a country called Ambrosia. In both, he is skilled, intelligent, successful, universally admired, etc. In real life he acts with only one thought, How To Get Out Of This Mess, and in the end fails to act even on his one major decision, to go to London and seek his fortune as a script writer for a stand-up comic. He has engaged himself to three young women, only one of whom is in any way his match, but she sees through his gormlessness, and decides to dump him. He has failed to mail 200 promotional calendars for his employer, an undertaker, and has been disposing of them surreptitiously at the rate of two or three per day ever since. He does a stand-up routine at a tavern, but does it badly. And so on.
     I’ve read many occasional pieces by Waterhouse in Punch, and this novel somehow seems uncharacteristic. If it’s auto-biographical, as it seems to be, then it was written to purge some demons. I read this book hoping for some redeeming action. The only insight Billy achieves is that he doesn’t have the guts to go to London, but even that is suppressed as soon as he has it. The book had some fame in its day, probably because its scenes of lower-class idiocies encouraged the readers to feel superior to the characters. ** (2002)
     Update 2013: Waterhouse died in 2009. An obituary can be found here: Waterhouse Obituary in the Telegraph