Crumb Borne
 | |
| Author | Clive Barry |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Russell & Hinrichs |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Black humour, Naturalism, Absurdism |
| Publisher | Faber & Faber, Penguin |
Publication date | 1965 |
| Publication place | Great Britain |
Crumb Borne is a novella by Clive Barry, published in 1965. Fascinating critics with its hyper sensory descriptive style, deadpan absurdism, and pitch black humour, it was awarded the first ever Guardian Fiction Prize.[1]
Background
Set in a prisoner-of-war camp during World War II, Crumb Borne is, by turns, a painstaking dissection and perverse parody of its author's own lived experiences. As a dashing youth, Barry performed a well documented real-life escape, in a straightforward act of nerve and intrepidity befitting a Boy's Own article.[2] But, as observed in The Observer, Frugal—Crumb Borne's "extraordinarily ugly and unpopular" protagonist—seeks his liberty in the most "marvellously eccentric and magical manner" possible.[3]
Critical Reception
Reviewers variously compared Barry's "brutal comic compound disasters" to Beckett but with a "swifter and more sharply visual fantasy",[4] his "extraordinary visual sense" to Grosz for "verbalising the peculiar line and force of an expressionist cartoonist",[5] his descriptive method to Rolfe "but the details are smaller, sharper, and the ultimate picture more compelling"[6] and his "black clowning" to "a more robust, less aesthetical Nabokov—the Nabokov of 'Invitation to a Beheading.'"[7]
Robert Nye, writing in The Guardian, characterised the book itself as too "recklessly original an outsider to walk away with an establishment prize." Ironically, months later, his own newspaper created a book award and made Crumb Borne its first first prize winner.
References
- ^ [1] Archived 2011-03-28 at the Wayback Machine Manly Biographical
- ^ "ABC man's escape From Italy — walked four hundred miles". Trove. Retrieved 2024-11-24.
- ^ "Crumb Borne, John Coleman review". Newspapers.com. 1965-05-23. Retrieved 2024-11-24.
- ^ "Award for elusive author". Newspapers.com. 1965-11-27. Retrieved 2024-11-24.
- ^ Webb, W. L. (1965). "A Review of The Year's Fiction". Critical Survey. 2 (3): 182–185. ISSN 0011-1570.
- ^ "Crumb Borne, Robin Oakley review". Newspapers.com. 1965-07-14. Retrieved 2024-11-24.
- ^ "Crumb Borne, Robert Nye review". Newspapers.com. 1965-06-25. Retrieved 2024-11-24.