15. John Braine:

 

Room at the Top

written: 1957

(229 pages)

 

read in January 2014

verdict: **** LIKE

 

This time we discovered a real gem: the novel Room at the Top, by British author John Braine (1922-1986). Written in the late 1950s, it takes you back to small-town post-war England, where your accent betrayed your class right away, and where "being an accountant" was considered an almost preposterous career ambition. Braine's fluent and easy language, interspersed with lots of dialogue, had us hooked right from the start.

 

You follow the story of narrator Joe Lampton, an upstart from a small industrial Northern English town, who wants to make it big. His dream is to break out from his working class environment and hang out with the big guys. In this he is quite ruthless: people are graded on wealth, influence and good looks and Joe Lampton is not about to settle for anything less than a grade-1 female. He never takes his eyes off this goal, even when he realises how high the cost might be. He knows himself to be in love with the more mature and married Alice and feels only mild amusement for silly young Susan, but he sets these feelings aside to nudge Susan into marrying him, because, quite simply, her father is the most influential man in Warley.

 

Written from a first-person-perspective, the reader gets to know Joe's real thoughts and emotions. At times he might come across a little psycho-like, but we found his single-minded stubborness and rather small-town ambition quite endearing. His disgust and contempt for his old life, the self-consciousness when he is with people of a higher standing and the brutal honesty with which he admits his innermost feelings to himself are recurring topics throughout the narrative and make him very human.

 

As protagonists go, Joe Lampton is a far cry from the American-psycho figure that the book cover had led us to expect. Compared to the vices and woes of 21st century capitalism, his dream job in accountancy and a house in the burbs doesn't strike us as all that ambitious. Today, we would find Joe Lampton among the Apprentice-crowd, and I'm not sure he wouldn't be outsmarted by the upstarts of our own time.

 

In any case, we liked Joe quite a lot. Of course at the end, when he realises that life at the top is not all it's cracked up to be and that the struggle to stay on top starts right when you have reached it, we didn't feel too sorry for him either. He consciously chose wealth and status over self-respect and peace of mind. And he is quite aware of it too, as the next book, Life at the Top, shows. Maybe it's this introspection and the lucidity with which he recognizes Warley's potentates for the "annoying children" they really are, that made him so endearing to us. In our opinion, he is one of the (head-)strongest and most interesting characters in 20th century English literature. We could definitely relate to him.

 

Unfortunately, we couldn't sympathize at all with the female protagonists of the novel. Susan was plain out silly and annoying, to the point where it became incomprehensible that she should be such a good catch that a guy like Joe would want to spend the rest of his life with her, and although Alice started out as the cool femme fatale, she quickly deteriorated into a love-stricken mental wreck dependent on Joe's love. We would have preferred to have a strong female character in the book as well, but it's definitely a man's world in John Braine's universe, and women are relegated to the position of ornament, sex toy or means for promotion.

 

Anyway the book got us so hooked that for the first time in our surprise book sessions, we went out and bought the sequel, Life at the Top. Joe Lampton is now ten years older, with a "spare tire" around his waist, a pronounced cigarette and booze habit and a neurotic wife. The life that he had so much craved in the first book didn't turn out all that rosy and his son definitely did seem the American-psycho type. In the beginning, that kid just creeped us out. But again, Joe has nobody but himself to blame for the predicament he's in. But since the review is not about the sequel, we won't go into further detail. If it got you interested, by all means go on and read it!

 

Both books have been made into movies but the beginning on YouTube didn't tempt us. They could never live up to our imagination anyway.

 

In short: great social study, great protagonist, great writing skills. And on top of it, it even was a two-in-one deal. Say no more: two definite LIKES.