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According to Queeney

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This is novel number 16 for Ms. Beryl Bainbridge. In addition to these she has written an additional 4 works. Of the first 15 novels, 5 have been nominated for the prestigious Booker Award, however it has never been granted to her work. If there is another writer who has had one third of their work nominated but not rewarded, I have not come across one. Many other awards have found their way to this tremendous storyteller; I hope the Booker Folks catch up.

"According To Queeney", demonstrates once again the ease with which Ms. Beryl Bainbridge can reach, both back into history and to some of the great players of their times, and not only grasp, but create wonderful new tales. The century of choice this time is the 18th, and she chooses the formidable Samuel Johnson as her focus. This person alone would be plenty for most writers, however she has added actor David Garrick, poet Oliver Goldsmith, novelist Fanny Burney, and artist Joshua Reynolds. Each of these people could fill their own book, and more than one has. The brilliance of this work is that the author manages to bring them all together, give them all they're due, and does so in a fairly brief 216 pages. She does not merely name drop or make a passing reference. She manages to make all of the various players memorable, however brief their words allotted may appear to be. The truth is they read with much greater length.

A young counterpoint to Johnson is the Queeney of the title. An extremely precocious child, she is a favorite of Johnson's as well as a talented young mind he seeks to cultivate. This same Queeney becomes a correspondent for a researcher investigating her memories of her young years, as they relate to her and her mother, the latter of the two who Johnson becomes emotionally attached to. The mother eventually becomes available for marriage, and the events surrounding this opportunity bring the threads of the story together, and then to a close.

This is one of the best books that Ms. Bainbridge has written. I hope the people who nominate and then award The Booker Prize, once again nominate this work, which they make a decision that differs from those in the past. If they do not, when her next work is released, she will then be the 6 times nominated author for the award.

Beryl Bainbridge's new historical novel takes a fresh, and rather disturbing, look at Samuel Johnson, LL.D., the eminent 18th century lexicographer and man of letters. Dr. Johnson (as he is usually referred to) is, of course, well-known as the subject of English literature's first great biography, James Boswell's "The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D." (1791). But Boswell, who worshipped Johnson, failed to include some of the less appealing and less attractive aspects of Johnson's life and personality. It is these that Bainbridge writes about in "According to Queeney."

Queeney was the real-life daughter of Hester Lynch Thrale, one of Johnson's closest friends and confidantes. In fact, Johnson lived, off and on, at Mrs. Thrale's estate, Streatham Park. Through the voice of a third-person narrator, along with a series of letters written by Queeney to her girlhood friends, we discover that Dr. Johnson was deeply depressed (or melancholic, as they called it back then), obsessed with death, sexually conflicted, and a masochist--in short, a bundle of neurotic tics and rifts. Bainbridge's book is brilliant not only in its expose of the dark side of Dr. Johnson, but also in its depiction of the literary and social world of 18th century London, especially the upper classes. While non-specialists in this period of English literature may be challenged to keep up with who's who and what's what, in the end the challenge is well worth taking up.

Beryl Bainbridge seems to be an author people either love or hate; there just doesn't seem to be much inbetween. Personally, I love her books and I think she certainly must be one of today greatest living authors.

"According to Queeney" is, in my opinion, one of Bainbridge's very best. In this book she tells us much about the life and times of Samuel Johnson, the 18th century poet, editor of Shakespeare, journalist, critic, lexicographer, novelist, biographer and playwright.

Most people owe what they do know about Samuel Johnson to James Boswell whose biography of Johnson is considered by many to be the greatest biography ever written and surely the greatest ever written in the English language. Boswell, however, committed a grave error when he wrote his biography of Johnson; he fell in love with his subject matter. Boswell revered Johnson so much that he simply couldn't bring himself to include the darker side of Johnson's life, and it did have its darker side. It is this side...the darker one...that Bainbridge explores in "According to Queeney." As anyone who's ever engaged in gossip knows, our darker moments are far more interesting that are our lighter ones. No wonder this book is so good.

Queeney really did exist and she really was acquainted with Johnson. Her real name was Hester Maria Thrale and she was the eldest daughter of Hester Lynch Thrale and Henry Thrale, a wealthy, 18th century brewer who just happened to be Johnson's closest friend and confidante. Queeney is even mentioned in Boswell's biography of Johnson; she died in 1858, at the age of ninety-four, so she was no doubt the last surviving person to actually know Johnson personally.

The lives of Johnson and the Thrale's were intertwined, to some extent, for a full twenty years. Johnson retained his own room in the home of the Thrales, called "Streatham Park," and he even taught Latin to the Thrale children. His confidante extraordinaire became Mrs. Thrale, and, by all accounts, she came to know the deeper, darker side of the great Samuel Johnson.

Bainbridge has chosen to tell her story of Johnson from several viewpoints, all to the good, I think. We encounter an omniscient, third-person narrator; an assortment of Johnson's friends; Mr. and Mrs. Thrale, of course; Johnson's housekeeper; Mrs. Desmoulins, a one-time companion to Johnson's wife; and Queeney, the most important and by far, the most captivating. Queeney's story is told in her own voice and through a series of genuine letters that are strewn throughout the book. The letters were written years after Johnson's death and are in the form of reminiscences. They give us a very vivid picture of Samuel Johnson, not according to Boswell, but, as Bainbridge tells us "according to Queeney."

Bainbridge's (and Queeney's) Samuel Johnson is a far darker, and more interesting personality than the one we meet in the pages of Boswell's biography. According to Queeney, Johnson was a man who suffered from frequent bouts of melancholia, was sexually repressed, had a morbid fear of death and even showed some striking masochistic tendencies.

"According to Queeney" opens with Johnson's autopsy (right away, we know this is going to be a "dark" book), and works its way backwards. The action then focuses on the year 1766; Johnson had known the Thrale's for about a year and Queeney was almost two years old. Johnson, who was childless, definitely saw himself as a "father figure" to the charming and strong-willed Queeney (and her sisters) and he would be a major influence on her life for the next twenty years.

When Johnson met Queeney and the other Thrale's, he was already deeply mired in the mental and physical illness that plagued him for the rest of his life. Bainbridge writes many engrossing set pieces and scenes in which Johnson confronts the demons that haunt his waking and sleeping hours. These set pieces are all exquisitely and precisely written and provide a vivid portrait of Johnson...as he really was.

Johnson was, as we are shown (not told), a man who constantly wavered between madness and wisdom. While Boswell would have us believe that Johnson was remarkable for only his virtues, Bainbridge generously lets us know that he was also remarkable for his weaknesses, especially masochism. This doesn't, however, make Johnson thoroughly unlikable; Bainbridge presents Johnson as supremely human, a man who was beset by vices, but who didn't give in to them willingly.

For those who are familiar with Boswell's portrait of Samuel Johnson, Bainbridge should be required reading. She balances the portrait, letting us see the dark side of Johnson as well as the light. Personally, I find Bainbridge's book, and Bainbridge's Johnson, the more interesting. But the real star of "According to Queeney," is, on every count, Queeney, herself. "According to Queeney" is thoroughly engrossing, thoroughly absorbing, read.

In reviewing "According to Queeney"[review excerpted above],Publisher's Weekly wrote: "...few novelists now alive can match Bainbridge for the uncanny precision with which she enters into the ethos of a previous era."

Uncanny? Yes. Very weird. Precise? I absolutely don't think so-unless you'd believe that 18th century upper-class people lived in a constant state of misery due to(among other things)clinical depression, sexual repression, religious fanaticism and/or hypocrisy, disease, and the lack of indoor plumbing. My main problem with this book is its unremitting unpleasantness, both of tone and character, and its rather superficial assumption that there's some kind of need to dispel an imagined rosy picture of "ye olden days" by swinging wildly in the other direction: a modernist, disaffected, determinedly downbeat view of humanity.
There isn't a single likeable person in the book, nor does anyone seem to escape either madness, disease, bitterness, selfishness, hate, gluttony, stupidity, addiction-or a combination of the above. It's one thing to make one's central characters complex, another to divest them of anything positive, save, supposedly, intelligence. An author runs a great risk-and takes on a huge responsibility-when she chooses to write a fictional "novel" using real people, places, and events. Perhaps it's just me, but I believe that she owes these onetime living, breathing people something better-at least, something a little more considered than simply using them as objects on which to hang some imagined psychodramas. Yes, Johnson was a strange man...that's hardly news to anyone who's read anything about his personal life and habits. As for "Queeney's" mother, longtime Johnson friend Mrs. Thrale, well, gosh, she must have been something more than the histrionic shrew Bainbridge makes to bulge, faint, redden, pinch, hit and kick her daughter, her husband, and her friend Johnson by turns. This was a woman who was wealthy, witty, and a very sought-after hostess and guest-and yet in this novel her life is an unending misery...somehow I tend to think that she was bit more complex than that. But everything-every scene, every inner thought-is made into a kind of creepy horror for these "characters"...in this "narrative", poor Johnson can't even show up from an errand buying treats for his beloved cat, Hodge[a real incident recalled, like much of the basis for this novel, by James Boswell in his "Life of Johnson"], without this simple act being given new shades of direst import by Bainbridge's pen: the paper bag containing the liver seeps and drips with blood...give me a break. It's a short book, easily read in one or two sittings. The author has done research, yes-all of it obvious and based on easily available sources, though not resulting in anything more amazing or unusual than can be found in a standard book on "life in Johnson's London"(there actually is such a title-and many like it). Finally, when you decide to write a novel with a couple of real-life geniuses as your main characters, you'd better be at least as witty as they were. Bainbridge isn't up to that task.

Did everyone else know that Samuel Johnson wrote the first dictionary of the English language that still influences writers of dictionaries today? Has everyone else read a book by Beryl Bainbridge? If not, _According to Queenie_, Bainbridge's latest historical novel about the 18th century genius Samuel Johnson and his relationship with the wealthy, beer-brewing Thrale family, is a perfect introduction to both. I thoroughly enjoyed being transported to that earlier, innocent, no-tech time and being reminded that then, as now, there were those (even geniuses) with serious psychological "issues" and families that could be described as "dysfunctional."

It does help, I believe, to do a little research about Johnson before- or while--reading the book. (No, I shall not read, nor recommend, all of Boswell's "Life of Johnson.") But the characters in the book are based on real people. If the book has a fault, it's that Bainbridge seems to assume that the reader already knows something about the characters before the first word is read. But even if one doesn't, as I didn't, I would recommend this book simply for its intelligent, well-crafted, scintillating prose. It left me wanting to read more about and by Samuel Johnson and definitely wanting to read more books by Beryl Bainbridge.

If you were a close reader of Boswell's "Life of Johnson" & Hester Thrale Piozzi's "Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson", or the later generations of Johnson biography, your imagination might have led you to conclude that the family life which Johnson experienced in the Thrale household was not, er, Leave It To Beaver. Husband Henry died too early, and was a philanderer. Hester gave birth to too many children who died young. (I don't know if child mortality was above average for their time, but it was sad enough as it was.) And the Thrale brewery was in financial difficulties, due to some mad ideas of Henry's. Into this household came a very depressed Samuel Johnson.

Ms Bainbridge has chosen this for the setting for her latest historical novel. One might question the choice: so many people treasure Johnson the gregarious talker, that seeing him described in a time of decay, and with the arguments and rivalries of his London household... well, let's just say it may be a realistic picture, but it's not a pretty one for those plunking down $200 for Johnson Toby mugs at eBay.

But Bainbridge has done this very well. Johnson is certainly in the book, and plays a strong role, but the truly interesting story is the arguments between Hester and daughter Queeney, accompanied by the dying days of Henry. Bainbridge should be applauded for what she's done. Most people only know Hester through what Boswell has written (and at that, mostly a claim that she is inaccurate), and that's very unfair. Bainbridge has given Hester additional dimensions, and displayed the sadness of her life.

"Queeney", as she is, is an interesting character, but she is mostly a device, a way of framing Hester's story. It's really not about Queeney so much as her perceptions of all that happened, and her perceptions are balanced by an omniscent narrator.

I'm rather pleased with this - - Bainbridge has taken Hester's anecdotes and diaries, and given us a side of both Hester & Johnson we wouldn't have otherwise have imagined.

Not one of the late author's better works. Try Dressmaker or Sweet William which are much better.

I found this book to be delightfully unusual! Two irascible, unappealing, but compelling chracters. I was somewhat familiar with Samuel Johnson having made my way through about half of Boswell's tome. Bainbridge has a remarkable gift for twisting life into one big ambiguity, filled with magic and darkness. According to Queeney follows Johnson's last twenty years and his friendship with the Thrale family. Most of the characters are enormously self-centered, remiss in love and filled with below first level longings. I found it to be odd and entertaining.

I've been a fan of Beryl Bainbridge for years and this rendition of the life of Samuel Johnson is right up there with Watson's Apology. It's still a mystery to me how she mixes the horror and humor of life so well. Certainly, the darkness of tone running through all her books is not for everyone. Although this novel retains her oblique storytelling style, it is easier to figure out what exactly is going on than in some of her previous novels. She captures perfectly the muck and disarray of 18th-century living and of Johnson's life.

Readers of the Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin series will undoubtedly recognize that Queeney in Bainbridge's new novel is the same Queenie in Aubrey's life. For fans of the Aubrey series, the importance of Queenie needs not be re-stated here. While "According to Queeney" is worthy to be read in its own right, O'Brian fans have the added pleasure of discovering new aspects of Queenie and her world.