Billy Liar (Penguin Decades)

Product Information

Waterhouse and I were once in the lounge of a Birmingham hotel, having earlier been in a Greek restaurant, where we had been co-opted onto the judging panel of a belly dancing contest.

Waterhouse left school at the age of 15 and worked at various odd jobs before becoming a newspaperman first in Yorkshire and then in London, remaining a columnist (for the Daily Mirror and Punch) for most of his life. Relations between Geoffrey and Billy have broken down, providing the story's main source of conflict. This may indeed be strange, because Stradhoughton, the fictional Yorkshire backwater where the novel is set could in reality have been close to where I was raised and indeed the city of my birth, Wakefield, is mentioned several times, where it might even be understood to be at some height of cosmopolitan sophistication. She rarely sits down in the play, constantly working hard to keep the house tidy and look after her husband, her mother, and Billy.The 1963 film was directed by John Schlesinger and featured Tom Courtenay, who played the part when Albert Finney left the cast in the West End play, as Billy and Julie Christie as Liz, one of his three girlfriends. but then, in the end, "Billy Liar" is the charming, if a little rambling, and maudlin story of a young man unable to find his place in a world that feels too small and mean and petty for his vivid imagination and lust for life. Unusually, almost all the main characters are children; the film attempts to show the world through the eyes of an innocent child. They’re supposed to stir up concupiscence, so with one of his unenthusiastic girlfriends he’s continually slipping a pill or two into her tea then hopping about for the next 15 minutes waiting for them to take effect.

Billy Liar is very funny: funny in a wild and sardonic and high-spirited way without malice or cruelty. Billy Liar marries the Angry Young Men agenda with a flippant, ironic, stiff-upper-lip aesthetic reminiscent of (a bitter) Wodehouse and Jerome - but at the same time manages to retain humanity and warmth. So with the underage drinking, back-talking to parents, premarital sex and direct (at least for the 1950s) references to birth control, I imagine that this book was quite rebellious and ground-breaking in its day.His second novel, Billy Liar(1959), was a major success, winning critical acclaim and becoming a bestseller; it is now considered a modern classic. I don't have the foggiest idea of where to get a copy of this, but I am anxious to do so , frankly due to its connection to The Smiths.