沉默地带

Beryl Bainbridge’s dramas of failed attachment By Christopher Tayler I n 1986, the English novelist Beryl Bainbridge signed a contract with an editor at William Collins for a non-fiction book about Liverpool. It was, in certain ways, an unlikely proj- ect. Then in her mid-fifties, Bain- bridge was already well on her way to the status of a slightly rackety grande dame, having made her name in the Seventies with a blizzard of short, el- liptical novels, comic in execution but tinged with an underlying dark- ness. Her writing often returned to her childhood and adolescence in Formby, a few miles north of Liver- pool. …