The Breaking of Bumbo

Description

The Breaking of Bumbo was first published fifty years ago when the author was twenty-two. It was an immense success and caused something of stir. To quote from the original blurb, 'Bumbo Bailey is a coward and a bit of a hero; a martyr, an egoist, a clown, a debs' delight and a Suez mutineer; a non-conformist Old Etonian Guardee . Partly his own victim, and partly the victim of his own small world, he is Made, and has his Season; and is Broken. Bumbo pursues his career from Caterham to an Officers' Training School; from the Officers' Training School to Wellington Barracks; and from Wellington Barracks to any number of wildly assorted parties. He learns a lot about Sex and Love and Discipline - and a little about himself; in the end he behaves very oddly indeed; and faces, in his own way, the consequences.' This however is more than a period piece, the social milieu it describes may have vanished, but the novel's satirical brio lifts it above its immediate provenance; it continues to read freshly. 'This bitter, ironical and very clever first novel paints a devastating portrait of an upper-class misfit, half clown, half Hamlet . . .' Evening Standard 'Gruesomely funny . . . a violent virility that is infectious' Tatler

Andrew Sinclair (born 1935) is a novelist, historian, critic and film-maker. He was a founding member of Churchill College, Cambridge. From his rich, varied and extensive bibliography Faber Finds is reissuing his first two novels, The Breaking of Bumbo and My Friend Judas, both published in 1959, his history of Prohibition in America, Prohibition: The Era of Excess and his cultural history of Britain in the 1940s, War Like a Wasp: The Lost Decade of the Forties.