It was adapted for television in Warsaw and turned into a stage musical in Budapest. It was regarded as a condemnation of money-making, a debased culture, the whole capitalist Western way of life, than to endure which it would be better to be dead. But in Eastern Europe it had a late success. The book tries to encapsulate a period and an ethos now dead, and I cannot think of it as much more than a jeu dashed off to make a hundred pounds or so.
ONE HAND CLAPPING FULL
He knows nothing of this, having been, like his wife, to a secondary modern school, but he is oppressed by an image of the past full of great bearded men who transmitted to the future books which warn of evil and coming breakdown, books which my young man knows he will never read. He will enter the contest and specialise in questions on English literature. Her husband watches a quiz programme in gloom but thinks highly of the money prizes. We heard it all evening long on the television. There was no difficulty with my shopgirl’s idiolect. Leonards pub who knew all the tricks of shady manipulation which make used cars seem less used. As the husband of my heroine works in a used car business, I had to study used car advertisements and drink with a man in a St. The book was a rapid joy to write, a month’s worth of bricolage, for which commercial television and the Daily Mirror gave me most of what I needed. Now he was sober and greying and had difficulty with some of the harder words in the quiz questions. In the 1930s the young Hughie Green was often on the front cover, a youth of our own age in tails and with wide happy mouth, a precocious singing and dancing star, brash and outgoing. The ambience of these two young people was presented very adequately in the Daily Mirror There was a weekly quiz programme with accumulative money prizes whose master was a Canadian named Hughie Green.
‘How far did I understand women? I would find out by turning myself into a woman I would write a first-person narrative about a girl working in a supermarket, pretty, cheerful, optimistic, married to a rather gloomy young man who suspects that the world is going to pot but is too uneducated to know why. But once Howard unleashes his unusual brain on the world, the used-car salesman can’t seem to stop and what he sees as the logical conclusion to their success isn’t something Janet can agree to.Īnthony Burgess’s darkly comic satire of 1960s consumerism explores themes of the importance or otherwise of culture and education and the growing influence of America, and taps into contemporary anxieties about the future. She is quite happy with the routine of their ordinary life, improved as it is by consumer goods and modern household conveniences. Janet doesn’t want their lives to change that much. Their lives begin to change when Howard’s photographic memory wins them a gameshow fortune.
Howard works at the local garage and Janet works in the local supermarket, and they spend their evenings having dinner in front of the television. One Hand Clapping is the story of Janet and Howard Shirley, living a dreary life in the dreary fictional northern city of Bradcaster.
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