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    Watson's Apology: A Novel
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    Watson's Apology: A Novel
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    Watson's Apology: A Novel
    Ebook339 pages5 hours

    Watson's Apology: A Novel

    By Beryl Bainbridge

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A novel of marital bickering—and murder—based on a historical case in Victorian England, from the bestselling author of The Birthday Boys.

    In the winter of 1884, John Selby Watson, a clergyman and headmaster living in London, writes a series of love letters—including a marriage proposal—to a woman he met only briefly at a social gathering many years before. Though Anne Armstrong does not remember Watson, she is desperate to escape poverty and the miserable life she shares with her sister in a moldy Dublin boarding house. So she accepts.
     
    Despite the abrupt circumstances of their engagement—and Anne’s initial distaste for her betrothed—several years of happy marriage follow. But Watson soon becomes entrenched in his studies of classical literature, leaving his wife feeling alienated and dejected. Trivial disputes agitate the couple’s domestic life with increasing frequency—a letter goes missing, the page of a book gets stained—until the bickering erupts into full-blown abuse and, during a night of drinking, their toxic environment reaches its destructive climax.
     
    Based on a real nineteenth-century murder case, Watson’s Apology is a speculative novel about the complex psychological motivations that underlie a seemingly straightforward domestic tragedy. Using dark irony and twisted humor, award-winning British author Beryl Bainbridge reveals the terror that resides in the banal, and the suspense that can be found in the mysteries of the mind and heart.
     
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateNov 1, 2016
    ISBN9781504039949
    Unavailable
    Watson's Apology: A Novel
    Author

    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.  

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    Reviews for Watson's Apology

    3.5/5

    25 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      In repressive mid-Victorian London, a pedantic English schoolteacher is yoked in marriage to an unsympathetic Irish wife. They torment each other ceaselessly until. . . "Watson's Apology" is notable not for its plot, but for the absolute mastery of tone which the author demonstrates on nearly every page. IMHO, the cumulative impact is all the much greater because of, not in spite of, Bainbridge's "dryness" and "detachment" from her doomed characters.If you've never read a Beryl Bainbridge before, you might want to try one of her later works first. BB is an acquired taste. . .
    • 4/5
      A real murder case is the focus of this novel by one of my favorite authors, Beryl Bainbridge. She notes that although the facts of the case are true, she has endeavored to take "the historical facts of this mundane murder case" and add certain "motives of the characters, their conversations and their feelings," so that the reader might understand how a respectable schoolmaster could go berserk and kill his wife.- don't worry, no spoilers:Mr. John Selby Watson remembered a girl he had met once at the home of a mutual acquaintance, a Miss Anne Armstrong. Miss Armstrong and her sister Olive were of the upper classes until during the Irish troubles, the bank that their father's money was in closed. At that point, the family fortune went into decline; now the only family the two sisters had was each other, and their situation was pretty much hopeless. We know from the start that Anne has some problems; Olive was always holding up some past crime of Anne's that got her fired from a position as governess. Anyway, Watson, who is getting on in years and who, if he marries, will get a larger salary & bigger home, decides to write Anne and offer her marriage. In her desperate situation, Anne agrees, and becomes the wife of the schoolmaster. Although Watson had been in his position for some 25 years or so, the board of the school voted him out; he had no prospects, Anne had turned out to be somewhat of a nag, driven by her tempestuous nature & he couldn't take it any more. So one day she ends up dead.Bainbridge combines real documents from the trial with a fictional narrative to try to explain why this meek, mild schoolmaster may have done away with his wife. It is truly somewhat of a nonstory overall, when you consider that there were murderers making headlines at the time who were much more newsworthy. But it is a really intriguing look into the psyches of two very different & desperate people that makes this book. I can definitely recommend this one; don't expect things to flow; the narrative is different from the usual but Bainbridge's writing, as always, is exquisite.
    • 5/5
      In 1844 a middle-aged Irish spinster by the name of Anne Armstrong, gets the unexpected chance to escape her life of genteel poverty. An English schoolmaster, the Reverend John Selby Watson, a man whom she met briefly more than seven years before, and whom Anne has long since forgotten, appears suddenly with a proposal. While the Reverend Watson is certainly no Prince Charming, and his home is in no way a castle, life with him is seemingly so much more preferable to Anne's current living situation - that she accepts John's proposal. Thus begins a marriage that should never have been - where frustrations pile upon disillusionments until everything collapses in hatred and bloody violence. For, after nearly thirty years of marriage, the quiet, staid, rather ordinary Reverend Watson bludgeons his wife to death one Sunday after church. The seemingly customary history of the Watsons' unhappy marriage unfolds until it culminates in a sudden brutal act and a headline-grabbing trial. Staying as true to the documented facts of this historical case as she does to the workings of her singular imagination, Ms. Bainbridge artfully reveals what history withholds: the motives, the feelings, and the insanity that drive the Watsons to their domestic tragedy.I did enjoy reading this book; although it seemed to me to be a little disjointed in places. Perhaps this was the impression that the author wanted to give the reader, I'm not really sure. However, I found this story to be incredibly sad - and although I usually enjoy reading tear-jerking stories - I think that the knowledge that this book was based on an actual murder case, was something that made this story almost too sad for me to read. I just felt incredibly sorry for all the characters involved, and the grinding hopelessness of the Watsons situation, as well as the historical period itself, really came through to me. I give Watson's Apology: A Novel by Beryl Bainbridge a definite A!
    • 3/5
      Somewhat experimental mystery, where the author appears to have tried to fill in the blanks on a real-world murder, where a clergyman killed his wife in 1871. Bainbridge goes all the way back to the murderer's young adulthood, and courting of the wife-victim, and goes on from there. It's a story of almost unrelenting misery, and not terribly edifying or satisfying.