SOURCE: “The Death of Tinkerbell,” in New Statesman and Society, January 5, 1990, pp. 38-9.

In the following review, Gerrard offers tempered assessment of An Awfully Big Adventure.

This is Beryl Bainbridge's first adult novel for five years, and initially it seems as if a sweet whiff of her writing for children curls round the edges of its chilly humour. The title harks back to jolly yarns and to Peter Pan's brave hopes; the setting is the raffish fifties society of weekly rep in Liverpool, where everyone is smeared with greasepaint and called “ducky”; the central character Stella—no star but assistant stage manager—is an aspiring actress who extracts drama out of the dustiest situations. The novel that Beryl Bainbridge evokes and rewrites is, inevitably, Priestley's Good Companions—a novel that has always struck me as more suitable for children than adults; and the play they rehearse is Peter...