The Bottle Factory Outing: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, 1974

Product Information

Patiently Freda explained that it wasn’t a bottle factory, it was a wine factory – that they would be working alongside simple peasants who had culture and tradition behind them. Brenda hinted that she didn’t like foreigners – she found them difficult to get on with. Freda said it proved how puny a person she was in mind and body. Our 300ml sports bottle is very popular with young children due to its weight and size. This makes it an ideal choice for junior schools and nurseries. Take a lesson from it then. It could happen to you. When I go I shall have my family about me – daughters – sons – my husband, grey and distinguished, dabbing a handkerchief to his lips …’

Provides two print areas for your artwork/logo; a band of 22.78cm x 1.2cm around the top of the bottle and a main print area of 22.78cm x 13.24cm Bainbridge tended to write autobiographical novels, often adding a murder into the mix to spice things up... this is no exception. But the outing itself goes on for too long- almost half of the book- and I found myself willing it to be over, which is not my usual response to Bainbridge's writing. It seemed to me inevitable who the victim would be, even how the body would be disposed of. Oh dear! I had such high hopes of this novel. The edition that I have just read has printed on its cover laudatory comments about the story by such literary heavyweights as Graham Greene and William Trevor. The former describes "The Bottle Factory Outing" as "an outrageously funny and horrifying story". In addition, the novel was shortlisted for the UK's most prestigious literary award - then known as The Booker Prize. And, it has apparently been cited by The Observer newspaper (a Sunday broadsheet in the UK) as one of the greatest 100 novels ever written. Well, I must have missed something. It's a moderately amusing novel whose glints of humour are overshadowed by the dullness and the implausibility of much of the story. "The Bottle Factory Outing" is a desperately disappointing read that deserves none of the accolades that have been heaped upon it. A string vest?’ said Brenda dubiously, and Freda couldn’t explain – it would have been wasted on her. Freda's also obsessively infatuated with her employer's nephew, Vittorio. He's the tall, rich, young and handsome Italian man and she spends lots of time daydreaming about living in his castello or his swanky flat in Hampstead. The funny thing is that one is never given actual proof that Vittorio actually has a castello in Italy and the flat in Hampstead is conjured out of Freda's fictional dream for future marital bliss. Freda is often found ogling him at work when she thinks he's busy. But the most humorous part of it all is that he's aware that she wants him and is always watching him. She kinda reminds me of this little dog and how he tries to hide the way he is salivating over the man's sandwich:She didn’t look as if she’d had a full life,’ said Brenda. ‘She only had the cat. There weren’t any mourners – no sons or anything.’ Yet even a master like Bainbridge can not have planned or foreseen one of the other disturbing double-takes the novel provokes. The Bottle Factory Outing is a curious book to read so soon after the UK’s EU referendum. It is set in England just before it joined the EEC and it is a drab, grey, poor world of rancid bedsits, where olives are exotic and hard to find and Italians an almost entirely unknown quantity: This book came my way courtesy of an Abacus Books 50th Anniversary gift box, and a few details made me reach for it first: the Camden (London) setting; a new Introduction by Amanda Craig; and the beguiling strangeness of Bainbridge herself.

Our 750ml sports bottle is ideal for the thirsty athletes amongst us. We find this bottle very popular with gyms, football/rugby/tennis/squash clubs and corporate banded sporting events.As a practice, our focus was to restore the historic identity of the former John Mills & Sons Mineral Water Factory and Bottling Works that had been diminished as a result of poor maintenance, insensitive adaptations and a disregard for building conservation. Having established her characters, Bainbridge brings them all together for a ridiculous and ultimately tragic day out in the country. It’s supposed to be a treat - a picnic, a day away, a sort of team-building outing - but again those words come to mind: absurd and squalid. Freda plans a seduction and Brenda hopes to avoid one, but the day unravels into something out of everyone’s control. Freda cooks up the scheme of a factory outing, which is one quirky calamity after another ending in complete disaster. That's where the unexpectedly bizarre twist steps in. Two very complex, funny female characters. They need each other although they would never admit it’ Maxine Peake

I don’t think the era of the book is directly named, but it seems like the 60s or early 70s. Freda and Brenda are modern women of a sort; Brenda has run away from her hard-drinking, middle-class farming husband, and Freda has no relations other than an elderly and judgemental aunt. They rely on themselves, and to some extent on each other - although they each display contempt for the other’s eccentricities and shortcomings. Neither can afford to live alone, yet their bedsit (and shared bed) cannot comfortably accommodate them both. My first Beryl Bainbridge and possibly my last unless my Goodreads friends have any recommendations. To which Brenda did not reply. She looked and kept silent, watching Freda’s smooth white face and the shining feather of yellow hair that swung to the curve of her jaw. She had large blue eyes with curved lashes, a gentle rosy mouth, a nose perfectly formed. She was five foot ten in height, twenty-six years old, and she weighed sixteen stone. All her life she had cherished the hope that one day she would become part of a community, a family. She wanted to be adored and protected, she wanted to be called ‘little one’.Ostensibly, The Bottle Factory Outing focuses on two mismatched young women, Brenda and Freda, who share a shabby bedsit while also working together at a local wine bottling factory. While Brenda is mousey and pessimistic, Freda is loud and outgoing, forever dreaming about the life she would like to be living – preferably that of a successful actress surrounded by friends and family. In the opening paragraphs, Brenda and Freda are watching the early stages of a funeral with the removal of a coffin from another flat in their building. As they speculate on the deceased – an old lady who lived with her cat – the differences between the two women become increasingly apparent. When life gives you lemons but you've got no sugar and the water is tainted, say goodbye to the lemonade... Freda and Brenda are two young women living and working in north London. Freda, aged 26, is a large, flamboyant and assertive blonde, with aspirations of going on the stage. The privately educated Brenda, aged 32, is more reticent and strives to avoid confrontation: she was previously married and lived in rural Yorkshire, but has left her husband and moved south. The two live together in a dismal bedsit, sharing a double bed, although Brenda insists on a barrier made up of a bolster and books to separate their respective halves. By day they work as labellers in a wine-bottling factory owned by Mr Paganotti, an Italian.

We have four different size bottles to choose from, as such you can tailor the bottle size and shape specifically to suit your needs. You can choose from several different colours (5 colours available) of sports bottles. You also have the option to choose the colour of the cap (7 colours available), and with our fantastic printing facilities you can have your own artwork or logo printed on them to perfectly promote your business/school/club.

300ml Sports Bottle

With this approach, we hope we have ensured the life of the building for another 100 years, and for many more chapters in its story. Despite occasional moments of effective comedy, "The Bottle Factory Outing" is an uninteresting story whose plot is ludicrously unrealistic. The writing style is dull and uneven and the characterisation is largely unconvincing. I simply could not believe that two individuals like Brenda and Freda would ever be friends with each other, let alone share a bedsit - and even a double bed (albeit with a protective barrier of books and bolsters to ensure the preservation of each other's private space). The actions of several other characters also seem highly improbable. These include a visit from Brenda's gun-toting mother-in-law and the disposal of a dead body in what can only be described as a most ridiculous manner. There are occasions too when the dialogue is unconvincing. At one point, Freda says the following words to Brenda: "You are not flotsam washed up on the shore, without recourse to the sea"! It is simply not credible that, given what we know of her character, Freda would speak in that way. I am afraid I simply could not believe the astonishingly grotesque conclusion of the story or the actions of the individuals involved. And I really didn't care about most of the major characters. Superb… taut in construction, expansive in characterisation, vibrant in atmosphere and profoundly comic’ The Times Ouch. And the worst thing is that by this stage in the novel we know something of Brenda. I actually found myself questioning whether she does talk too much. And so found myself wondering whether an entirely unreasonable statement had any kind of justification. And so again, after the laughter there had come a stomach lurch. It’s all similarly queasy and unsettling. It’s tremendous artistry. It’s a novel with a uniquely woozy feel – a jelly-legged sense of uncertainty – that feels all the stranger because the sentences appear so superficially straightforward. Oh, it's delicious. It's like a French movie in a book: you know it's over because the credits roll up the screen.