The Birdcage

Harper & Row, 1962-01-01. Hardcover. Good/Good. Harper & Row [Published Date: 1962]. Hardcover, 208 pp. Stated First Edition. Good in good dust jacket. Rose colored Paper over Boards with black cloth and gold lettering on spine. Light bumping, scuffing and fading to edges of covers. Binding tight. Previous owners address label of front free end paper. Otherwise pages are lightly aged but unmarked. Dust jacket has several 1" or less nicks and tears and creasing along edges. Light to moderate overall scuffing, aging and soiling to jacket as well. Price clipped. Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. [From jacket flaps] Admirers of prewar Waugh, of Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson are hard up for novels to read between times. John Bowen emerges as the answer - very much his own man but belonging to the same order and exhibiting its characteristics: dead-pan observation of the human comedy; cool, meticulous reporting of the outrageous; impiety as lightly worn as a well-cut jacket. The opening passage of The Birdcage brushes with moth-wing impudence one of the most hallowed scenes in today's intellectual canon: a pair of lovers at a table among the pigeons of the Piazza San Marco. The final chapter, entitled "Only Connect," raises an interrogative and perhaps impertinent eyebrow in the direction of E. Morgan Forster himself. In between, The Birdcage relates the events of a year or two in the lives of Norah Palmer and Peter Ash, who, when our story opens, have been living together for nine years without marriage, an arrangement satisfactory from the point of view of tax saving and practical in every other respect. The Birdcage is frequently hilarious, at times ruthless, in places moving. It does not solicit the reader's patronage. It will, however, repay his curiosity with a full measure of adult entertainment. Born in India in 1924, John Bowen spent a childhood in England, shuttled among aunts, grandparents, and boarding schools. His war service was in the Indian Army, and after the war he went to Oxford, where he was awarded the Frere Exhibition in Indian Studies for two years running. He spent a year in this country, partly at Ohio State University, partly at the Kenyon School of Letters, and partly hitchhiking. He has taught English, worked as assistant editor of a glossy magazine, and as a copywriter for one advertising agency and copy chief of another. He gave up advertising to "live of his own" in 1960. Mr. Bowen has written books for children, radio plays, television plays, a theater play, and five novels, and has appeared on radio and television, mostly on the B.B.C.'s Third Programme and on television programs about the arts. He has written and broadcast criticism, not only about literature, but about ballet and the theater. His four previous novels published in England have all been widely and well received; of one, The Center of the Green, published in America, Dorothy Parker wrote, "Sure, disciplined, beautiful writing . . . you hate to turn the pages, thus bringing the end closer. I have no more heartfelt tribute to offer a novel.