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Room at the Top John Braine 9780416006117 Books

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Room at the Top John Braine 9780416006117 Books

"With an instinct like a water-diviner's where money's concerned," twenty-five-year-old Joe Lampton is ready for "a very different world." His parents dead, having been raised by an aunt in Dufton, an impoverished and dying town with a river running nearby filled with "water as sluggish as pus," and having fulfilled his military service Joe is ready to move on up in life. He wants a life with "no more zombies" as he and his best friend Charles Lufford dubs anyone they "didn't approve of" and Lampton is willing to do anything to make sure that a new and better life is his--at any price.

Room at the Top (1957; with an Introduction by Janine Utel in the Valancourt re-issue of 2013) is writer John Braine's immensely successful first novel and it stands as an important contribution to a short-lived group of literary works by a variety of writers in Britain exposing the frustration and angst of lower and blue-collar class individuals after World War II. Utel explains "the phrase `Angry Young Men' was coined by journalists and taken up by the media to characterize a loosely defined but still major shift in English literary culture."

Braine (1922-1986) has as his narrator Joe Lampton and Joe paints a very bleak picture of his hometown and roots and makes a start contrast between Dufton and Warley where Joe becomes an accountant for the City Council and believes he has found "a footing in a very different world." It is a "new way of living" and "a place without memories" for Joe where in three months he is more involved in the life of Warley "than I ever had been in my birthplace." In spite of (or possibly because of) these positives, Joe becomes an opportunist. To him success means money, material possessions, power, control, and above all, sex--all the things he has never known in his earlier life--and other people are merely objects who fall onto a rating scale created by him and his friend Charles. For Joe, "life doesn't often bother to be charming once childhood has passed" and Joe starts "manoeuvring for position all the time."

One of Braine's many accomplishments in Room at the Top is that when readers least expect it, Braine introduces some history or qualities into the character of Joe Lampton that humanizes him and allows the reader to understand and at times even sympathize with Lampton who might otherwise just come across as a callous, amoral man of ambition. Given his background, few readers are likely to find Joe's desire for a better life ignoble. The revelation about Joe's parents' death during the blitz is ironic and quite moving. There are passing references to Joe serving as a prisoner of war (although he appears to laugh off the experience as having been better than being killed or having to continue to fly RAF missions). Joe's sundry insecurities and loneliness are never far from the surface of his being and threaten to overcome him during challenging personal crises.

For Joe, his sexual escapades are a sign not just of physical conquest (he is frequently described by various women as attractive with one unknowingly calling him a "beautiful uncomplicated brute"), but as a sign of making it in the world--especially when the two women in his life and others who are attracted to him rate highly on his and Charles' scale. In little time at all he is "the devil of a fellow" carrying on an affair with an older, married woman--thirty-four-year old Alice Aisgill--and "taking out the daughter of one of the richest men in Warley," nineteen-year-old Susan Brown. Alice sees in Joe everything she doesn't get from her husband as she receives the attention of a younger, rapt, and sexual man and when seeing Alice isn't possible or her demands become too much for him, Joe turns to Susan Brown even though she frustrates him because she won't have sexual intercourse with him. There are times when Joe enjoys the best each has to offer and just as with his relations with others at work, Joe's self-centered nature which Braine so expertly exposes doesn't allow Joe to see or care what his impact is upon those around him.

Throughout Room at the Top Braine gives readers realistic characters and dialogue and real-life situations--some of which at times edges toward the melodramatic, but never crosses the line. The sexuality displayed in the novel, including Joe being approached by another man in a gay bar who Joe lets buy him a number of drinks with the attempted seduction obvious to both men and the reader, is modestly daring for its time.

The final pages of Room at the Top play out on a small, provincial scale much like an ancient Greek drama with the hubris of the main character reaching the top of his game by using others, leading others to tragedy, and learning too late the consequences of his selfishness. The book ends with a one-paragraph ironic twist that escapes the other characters in the book, but not Joe Lampton or the reader. It is amazingly succinct and well done.


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Room at the Top John Braine 9780416006117 Books Reviews

It's fifty years since A Room At The Top first appeared. Against a backdrop of post-war Britain, a period when people really did believe that a new future, a different kind of society was just around the corner, Joe Lampton, born January 1921, aspired to social and economic elevation. Though competent and already promoted, as a local government officer in a grubby northern English town, with spare time interests in amateur dramatics, cigarettes and beer, even he himself rated his prospects of success as very poor.

But Joe's other passion was the ladies. Two in particular caught his eye. Alice Aisgarth was married, older than him, and had a local reputation for being a bit "forward". Basically she wanted love and passion to light up her dull, unhappy life with excitement. Susan Brown was a different prospect entirely, being nineteen, virginal and daughter of a rich businessman. If Joe Lampton could never work his way to wealth, he might just be able to marry it. His problems arose out of Susan's desire to remain pure during their courtship, a position that meant Joe had to continue seeing Alice to satisfy his needs. Further complications arose when Susan relented and fell immediately pregnant.

Well Joe achieved his goal. He and Susan married and he attained what he had sought all along, a meal ticket for life. He was not entirely without conscience, however. So when the rejected Alice, who deeply loved him, is killed in a car crash after a drunken night trying to drown her sorrows, Joe Lampton does suffer some remorse. But eventually, like many social climbers, he achieves his heights by trampling on others.

What remains enduringly intriguing about Room At The Top is its portrayal of British society's obsession with social class. Joe perceives his best chance of social elevation is to marry money. And, in 2007, I re-read this novel in a week when a United Kingdom report declared that current day social class differences were widening, whilst opportunities for social mobility are actually decreasing. So John Braine's novel is also a social document. The book is very much of its own time. It reminds us, for instance, that in the 1950s everyone smoked - and smoked a lot. Men drank pints in the pub - some of which did not even admit women. Homosexuality was not only not tolerated, it was illegal, though remained visible. Some of the recorded individual aspiration now seems nothing less than quaint. Alice Aisgarth, for instance, declares that she would like to sleep with Joe. "Truly sleep," she qualifies, "in a big bed with a feather mattress and brass rails and a porcelain chamber pot underneath it." In the 1950s, most north of England houses did not have bathrooms and the potties were usually enamel.

But it is in the area of social class that A Room At The Top is bitingly and enduringly apt. Joe Lampton believes he lacks the capacity to succeed, lacks the necessary background, the poise, the breeding. He sees himself as essentially vulgar and possesses no talents which might compensate for this drawback. His rival for Susan Brown's affections, however, is one John Wales. He is studying for a science degree at Cambridge, and thus acquiring not only the knowledge which will ensure that he will become the managing director of the family firm, but will also endow the polish of manner, the habit of command, the calm superiority of bearing, the attributes of a gentleman.

Fifty years on, we might change an odd word, and the family firm might now be multi-national, but the spirit of contemporary Britain's class system is arguably the same. And so despite the aspiration for and perceived attainment of social change in post-war Britain, Room At The Top, juxtaposed with recent evidence, reminds us that very little, if anything, has changed - except for the cigarettes and the chamber pots, of course. Oh, and we might now also prefer lager.
Grabs you from the first page narrated by fiercely ambitious young Joe Lampton, an intelligent lad from a humble background. It's just after WW2 and accountant Joe has broken away from his grim northern hometown of Dufton for an accountancy position in the much more salubrious Warley. He appreciates his new, elegant lodgings,the middle class folk around him; he starts mixing with the select types who make up the local dramatic society; but he's constantly aware that he can never be the equal of the local bigwigs.
And while he begins a love affair with older, married Alice, he's also studiedly making up to wealthy, innocent young Susan Brown
"A Grade A lovely...the daughter of a factory-owner...the means of obtaining the key to the Aladdin's cave of my ambitions."
Compelling reading.
A brilliant book
QUICK DELIVERY
Nice book, reading it slowly. Cannot beat the movie which is great, but great feel for 50's England and aspirations out of poverty.
I first saw this film with Laurcme Harvey and Simone Signoret which was fabulous. But the book was so much better. John Braine captured the essence of the British Angry You Man literary movement.

Joe Lampton's desperate attempt to get ahead results in the destruction of not only Alice but also of himself. Set against post WWII Britain it is a grim and depressing portrait of one man's desperate to rise above the grinding poverty and loss and in the process destroys the person who loves and understands him the most.
"With an instinct like a water-diviner's where money's concerned," twenty-five-year-old Joe Lampton is ready for "a very different world." His parents dead, having been raised by an aunt in Dufton, an impoverished and dying town with a river running nearby filled with "water as sluggish as pus," and having fulfilled his military service Joe is ready to move on up in life. He wants a life with "no more zombies" as he and his best friend Charles Lufford dubs anyone they "didn't approve of" and Lampton is willing to do anything to make sure that a new and better life is his--at any price.

Room at the Top (1957; with an Introduction by Janine Utel in the Valancourt re-issue of 2013) is writer John Braine's immensely successful first novel and it stands as an important contribution to a short-lived group of literary works by a variety of writers in Britain exposing the frustration and angst of lower and blue-collar class individuals after World War II. Utel explains "the phrase `Angry Young Men' was coined by journalists and taken up by the media to characterize a loosely defined but still major shift in English literary culture."

Braine (1922-1986) has as his narrator Joe Lampton and Joe paints a very bleak picture of his hometown and roots and makes a start contrast between Dufton and Warley where Joe becomes an accountant for the City Council and believes he has found "a footing in a very different world." It is a "new way of living" and "a place without memories" for Joe where in three months he is more involved in the life of Warley "than I ever had been in my birthplace." In spite of (or possibly because of) these positives, Joe becomes an opportunist. To him success means money, material possessions, power, control, and above all, sex--all the things he has never known in his earlier life--and other people are merely objects who fall onto a rating scale created by him and his friend Charles. For Joe, "life doesn't often bother to be charming once childhood has passed" and Joe starts "manoeuvring for position all the time."

One of Braine's many accomplishments in Room at the Top is that when readers least expect it, Braine introduces some history or qualities into the character of Joe Lampton that humanizes him and allows the reader to understand and at times even sympathize with Lampton who might otherwise just come across as a callous, amoral man of ambition. Given his background, few readers are likely to find Joe's desire for a better life ignoble. The revelation about Joe's parents' death during the blitz is ironic and quite moving. There are passing references to Joe serving as a prisoner of war (although he appears to laugh off the experience as having been better than being killed or having to continue to fly RAF missions). Joe's sundry insecurities and loneliness are never far from the surface of his being and threaten to overcome him during challenging personal crises.

For Joe, his sexual escapades are a sign not just of physical conquest (he is frequently described by various women as attractive with one unknowingly calling him a "beautiful uncomplicated brute"), but as a sign of making it in the world--especially when the two women in his life and others who are attracted to him rate highly on his and Charles' scale. In little time at all he is "the devil of a fellow" carrying on an affair with an older, married woman--thirty-four-year old Alice Aisgill--and "taking out the daughter of one of the richest men in Warley," nineteen-year-old Susan Brown. Alice sees in Joe everything she doesn't get from her husband as she receives the attention of a younger, rapt, and sexual man and when seeing Alice isn't possible or her demands become too much for him, Joe turns to Susan Brown even though she frustrates him because she won't have sexual intercourse with him. There are times when Joe enjoys the best each has to offer and just as with his relations with others at work, Joe's self-centered nature which Braine so expertly exposes doesn't allow Joe to see or care what his impact is upon those around him.

Throughout Room at the Top Braine gives readers realistic characters and dialogue and real-life situations--some of which at times edges toward the melodramatic, but never crosses the line. The sexuality displayed in the novel, including Joe being approached by another man in a gay bar who Joe lets buy him a number of drinks with the attempted seduction obvious to both men and the reader, is modestly daring for its time.

The final pages of Room at the Top play out on a small, provincial scale much like an ancient Greek drama with the hubris of the main character reaching the top of his game by using others, leading others to tragedy, and learning too late the consequences of his selfishness. The book ends with a one-paragraph ironic twist that escapes the other characters in the book, but not Joe Lampton or the reader. It is amazingly succinct and well done.