1965 novel by Clive Barry
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
