The novelist and poet, who died a year ago, left a huge body of work distinguished by its melancholy wit and warmth. These are some of the highlights
P
aul Bailey, who died last October aged 87, was best known as a novelist of comic brilliance, wide-ranging empathy – even for the worst of his characters – and a cleverness that was never clinical. His fiction was frequently occupied with the impact of memories on our lives, and usually heavily driven by sharp, syncopated dialogue. But he was also a memoirist, poet and more besides – so here’s a guide to the legacy of books he left behind.
Bailey was a social creature, a great talker and lover of “trivial chit-chat”, as one of his characters puts it. Bailey and his friend Beryl Bainbridge used to watch Coronation Street and then compare notes over the phone. This fondness for a gossipy conversation is brought out in his novels Trespasses (1970) and Peter Smart’s Confessions (1977). Both feature a man surrounded by funny, maddening, over-the-top characters, who are usually so closely related to him that he can’t escape the gravitational pull of their nonsense. “Who wants to be normal anyway?” asks Ralph’s mother in Trespasses when he comes out to her as gay. Like spending an evening with your wittiest, and sometimes cheekiest, friend.
