 | |
| Author | Clive Barry |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Russell & Hinrichs |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Black humour, Naturalism, Absurdism |
| Publisher | Faber & Faber; Penguin |
Publication date | 1965 |
| Publication place | Great Britain |
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]
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 Boys' 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]
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,' say." [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.