Book Around the Corner

The Dressmaker by Beryl Bainbridge (1973) French title: La couturière. Translated by Françoise Cartano.

In English, The Dressmaker is a novella as it’s less than 200 pages long. My copy in French has 294 pages. Hmm. I’ll stick to the original and consider that it qualifies for Novellas in November on top of being my participation to Annabel’s Reading Beryl 2023 week.

The Dressmaker is my third Bainbridge after An Awfully Big Adventure and The Bottle Factory Outing and I know of her books only through blogging as I’ve never seen them in a French bookstore. I bought used copies or books in English.

The Dressmaker is set in Liverpool in 1944 and American soldiers are stationed in town. On Bingley Road, Nellie lives in her parents’ house with her sister Margo and her seventeen-years old niece Rita. Jack, the third Bingley Road sibling lives above his butcher shop and when his wife died, Rita came to live with her aunts.

Nellie is a competent dressmaker and her current job is to sew Valerie Mander’s dress for her engagement party. Valerie is engaged to GI Chuck and Rita envies her future blissful life in rich America. When Rita meets Ira at Valerie’s, she thinks she’s in love and is ready to a lot of compromise to pursue a relationship with him.

The atmosphere of the book is creepy on several levels. Nellie is stuck into the past and celebrates an unhealthy cult to her dead mother. She longs to meet her again in heaven and worships her mother’s furniture and belongings. Poor Rita must have been raised in a mausoleum.

Nellie refuses to acknowledge that times have changed and would gladly live under Queen Victoria. She despises her sister’s wish for male companionship and ten years ago ensured that she broke up with the man she was dating when he proposed. Now Nellie has decided that Ira won’t do.

The relationships in this family are toxic. Nellie rules the house as her mother probably used to. Jack is Rita’s father and she calls him “Uncle Jack”, he’s under Nellie’s influence and let go of his parental duties. Nellie and Margo took over.

Margo is a shameless flirt and she could be one of those ridiculous middle-aged persons who think they are still attractive when they’re not. She’s herself and oozes a je-ne-sais-quoi that appeals to the opposite sex, like Brenda in The Bottle Factory Outing. Margo works in a factory, something Nellie finds degrading and bad for her sister’s manners. Margo is more in tune with her time.

Rita is immature and lives in her own head. She loves the idea of Ira more than Ira himself. She doesn’t ask him any question about his life back home and she’s unable to answer simple questions about the man she’s dating such as where he comes from, what is profession is or what his parents do for a living. She intends to marry him and yet has no interest in him beyond the ticket to America he can provide. She’s not even ruthless, she deludes herself into thinking that she wants him when all she wants is his nationality. Like Freda in The Bottle Factory Outing, she wants a man to better herself in life.

The Dressmaker is an excellent picture of Liverpool in 1944, the people’s reactions to the American soldiers stationed in their town, the daily life difficulties and how the war moved the lines between men and women, with women working in factories.

However I felt uncomfortable during the whole story as Bainbridge builds a sense of foreboding. The whole thing can’t end well. I thought it was a lot like The Bottle Factory Outing. I’m not fond of the atmosphere of her books. She captures the daily lives of her characters very well but they all have something off and disquieting. There’s this feeling of domination, of sexual tension and abuse. Nellie is a dominating creep, Margo sounded better except for her disconcerting flirting choices, Jack is a wimp and Rita grew up among these disfunctioning adults and is a mix of cunning and naiveté.

The whole picture is chilling and while I’m aware that Bainbridge is an excellent writer, I don’t enjoy her books very much.