Another Part of the Wood
Social dysfunction meets dangerous perversion in this black comedy about two misfit families camping in the Welsh woods.
George McFarley, a six-foot-eight hulk of a man obsessed with the Holocaust, and his assistant, Balfour, an unbearably shy stutterer, are the unconventional hosts of a weekend camping retreat in Wales. Their guests include Joseph, a divorced college administrator from London; Dotty, his pretty but resentful girlfriend; Roland, his young son; and Kidney, his overweight and emotionally disturbed apprentice. Also staying on for the weekend are dysfunctional couple, Lionel and May—and a Welsh groundskeeper with a creepy fondness for cattle . . . and little girls.
Dotty has brought along the board game Monopoly, which she cannot live without, and which will serve as a microcosm for the roles and dramas played out by this motley crew. While the adults are caught up in petty bickering, power struggles, love triangles, and other bourgeois scandals, tragedy will befall one of the children and turn the bucolic setting into a twisted nightmare.
With award-winning author Beryl Bainbridge’s signature dark humor and sophisticated irony, Another Part of the Wood takes to task 1960s British cultural mores. As the plot twists and characters remove their masks, Bainbridge reveals the absurdity and danger of what is commonly considered “normal.”
Beryl Bainbridge
Dame Beryl Bainbridge (1932–2010) is acknowledged as one of the greatest British novelists of her time. She was the author of two travel books, five plays, and seventeen novels, five of which were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, including Master Georgie, which went on to win the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the WHSmith Literary Award. She was also awarded the Whitbread Literary Award twice, for Injury Time and Every Man for Himself. In 2011, a special Man Booker “Best of Beryl” Prize was awarded in her honor, voted for by members of the public.
Born in Liverpool and raised in nearby Formby, Bainbridge spent her early years working as an actress, leaving the theater to have her first child. Her first novel, Harriet Said . . ., was written around this time, although it was rejected by several publishers who found it “indecent.” Her first published works were Another Part of the Wood and An Awfully Big Adventure, and many of her early novels retell her Liverpudlian childhood. A number of her books have been adapted for the screen, most notably An Awfully Big Adventure, which is set in provincial theater and was made into a film by Mike Newell, starring Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant. She later turned to more historical themes, such as the Scott Expedition in The Birthday Boys, a retelling of the Titanic story in Every Man for Himself, and Master Georgie, which follows Liverpudlians during the Crimean War. Her no-word-wasted style and tight plotting have won her critical acclaim and a committed following. Bainbridge regularly contributed articles and reviews to the Guardian, Observer, and Spectator, among others, and she was the Oldie’s longstanding theater critic. In 2008, she appeared at number twenty-six in a list of the fifty most important novelists since 1945 compiled by the Times (London). At the time of her death, Bainbridge was working on a new novel, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, which was published posthumously.
