One of the great traditions of the Northern Englishman is bemoaning his lot of being born in the North, while not wishing to have been born anywhere else and not leaving.

Billy Fisher lives in a late 50s Yorkshire town, one of many. He works for a clerk at the undertaker, juggles three girlfriends and dreams of being a comedy writer in London. He is of the aspirational lower middle class, educated and clever enough to see the horizons of life in the provinces, but maybe not enough to break through them. He's also torn between his scorn for both the false-nostalgia of the Yorkshireman for his dreamy Yorkshire past on the moors, a nd the reality of the crap concrete-plastic-glass modernity paving it over. Billy therefore creates a parallel fantasy world, separating fantasy versions of his life and relationships into type 1 thinking and the subconscious-dread-creeping-to-the-top of reality into type 2 thinking. Through the book, the former initially dominates, starting as a comedy, while the latter catches up, bringing a very different feeling towards the end.

Billy Fisher is almost an Angry Young Man, but not quite. Most of the aspirational types in these post-war stories find themselves battling into the upper middle class and cosmopolitan world, they desire, but but Billy Fisher doesn't even get that far. His is a mental block. He has the opportunity to leave the life he bemoans, but might actually find more comfort in his bemoaning than risking it for the unfamiliar.

(One thing that stuck out for a book from the 1950s: the impoverished Northerner who didn't have nowt when he were little and were walking 10 miles for a 15 hour Sunday shift at pit is such a common joke now but I was surprised that it even seemed common this far back, when Billy parodies it himself. I'm sure elder miners were calling the youngers soft when the safety lamp was introduced.)

Billy Liar

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