Billy Liar (Penguin Decades)

Product Information

It's about a boy, not even a very nice boy, and the fantasy worlds in which he takes refuge from reality.

Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse | Goodreads

Over the next 10 years David took a lot of film of his family, but virtually all of it is outside Yorkshire. On the surface of it all, Billy Fisher is a typical young man living in the cheerless Yorkshire town of Stradhougton. Across the Pennines, Sarah Hall finds something implacable and unforgiving in her Cumbrian heritage. The 1963 John Schlesinger film adaptation with Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie is a firm favourite and remains etched into my memory. In 1962 John Betjeman described the growing structures of glass and concrete as ‘international nothingness’.

Perhaps what the film teaches is that it is relating to other people that really counts – which Billy never really manages to do. Shadrack himself, young adult Billy Fisher often daydreams as a means of escape from what he considers his less than satisfying life, and in the process will tell bald-faced lies to advance his fantasy narrative. He is eventually found out by Shadrack, who refuses to let him resign from his position until he pays back the postage money.

Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse | Waterstones

Photograph: The Ronald Grant Archive Still from the film version of Billy Liar, with Leonard Rossiter (left) and Tom Courtenay in the title role. I first came across the name Billy Liar through the song of the same name recorded by The Decemberists in 2004, an upbeat piano driven pop song about a young man suffering from boredom, and it remains one of my favourite songs from the prolific band. Now, there is nothing more tiresome than people objecting to “miserabilism” and I accept that Billy’s fantasies are at least partly an indication of his dysfunction, his anxiety, his very reluctance to go out and face the world.

A lot of the more ambivalent reviews of this book seem to stem from the reader's confusion about what they were getting into- "was it meant to be a hilarious knockabout comedy or a tragedy?