The Breaking of Bumbo - Andrew Sinclair

 Andrew Sinclair may well be my new literary obsession.   In The Breaking of Bumbo (1959) a coming-of-age story meets the roman a clef.   Young Bumbo Bailey passes from Eton to National Service in the Guards.   He is a hopeless soldier, a good officer and an amiable chap.   Posted to Wellington Barracks in the Mall, Bumbo does Public Duties at the Tower and Palace and on Horseguards Parade, and in his spare time becomes embroiled in London Society both High and extremely Low.   It all takes place against the backdrop of the Suez Crisis about which Bumbo has scuples, which lead to his breaking.

It is all done with tremendous brio.   Sinclair has an experimental style which still reads fresh and lively more than sixty years on.   The training sector is laugh out loud hilarious.   The mood then becomes gradually darker.   Despite the light surface there are considerable depths here and I was surprised at how long it took me to read such a short novel.   Yet I absolutely adored it.   I'm off now to track down more of Sinclair's work.

The Hand-Reared Boy - Brian Aldiss

The Hand-Reared Boy, part one of Aldiss's Horatio Stubbs trilogy, purports to be the autobiographical coming-of-age memoir of a sexually-precocious teenager on the eve of World War II. Horatio, we assume, is Aldiss thinly coated. But is it? Aldiss, who died last month at the grand age of 92, is clearly not called Horatio and I doubt very much he had a brother called Nelson. Horatio, it is very clear, was born in 1922; he is seventeen when war breaks out in 1939. Aldiss, however, was born in 1925. So what is going on? What is real personal experience, and what is novelistic construct?

That is essentially what kept me going with this ebook - that, and Aldiss's plain-speaking prose style. What is basically a pubescent marathon of masturbation is rendered extremely readable. I remember reading it when it first came out, when I was Horatio's age, in 1970. It didn't interest me because I had all the usual teenage emotions, hopes and guilt about sex but I didn't have siblings and I didn't attend a public school. In fact, it put me off Aldiss for a considerable period. My feeling at the time was, this is an impossibly middleaged man (who was 45, the same age Horatio declares himself to be as he writes) with a moustache like my dad's, who was trying to cash in on the somewhat sordid British take on the sexual revolution of the Sixties. Reading it now, much older and with much more impressive facial foliage of my own, knee-deep in an age of Neo-Puritanism, I read with more experience, technical knowledge, and compassion.


Is Sister Traven, the school nurse, who relieves the pressure for so many of the boys in her care, based in any way on a real person? Did Aldiss, like Horatio, really interfere with his younger sister? As a senior Youth Magistrate I have sent boys into youth custody for doing exactly that. As a non-family person, now with no relatives whatsoever, what the hell goes on in ostensibly 'normal' families?


I bought the other two volumes in an Amazon Kindle deal on the day Aldiss died, so we shall see what develops.

The Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye is one of those books everybody should read at least once in their life. After all it is the book that J D Salinger wrote just once in his long life. OK, I have left it late - ironically about the same length of time that Salinger lived after starting to publish (serialized) his only novel, all 192 pages of it.

It is a roman a clef, a coming-of-age story, and quite possibly the ultimate of its kind. It's set over a few winter days between Holden Caulfield being expelled from his fancy private school and facing up to his parents back in New York. We don't witness the climactic moment, of course, but Salinger takes us to the verge, when Holden seems to admit to himself that he can't strike out on his own, that he hasn't got what it takes to stand on his own two feet. We have gathered, by that point, that he is writing his confessional from some sort of sanatorium in California.


Inbetween we have a frantic hothouse week in New York. Holden spends the last of his generous allowance on hotels, bars, night clubs. He is trying to break through into adulthood - he believes he looks much older than his eighteen years because he has a patch of grey hair, but his elders inevitably see his true childishness.


Reading The Catcher is like spending time in the company of the world's sulkiest, most self-centered teenager, which is what set the literary world on fire when the novel came out in 1951. You resent the guy, deplore his blather, even hate him - but if you are male and were ever a teenager, you know you dislike him because he is you.


Salinger's single masterpiece probably defines the term tour de force. I'm glad I finally read it. I'm equally glad I won't feel the need to do so again.