Billy Liar (Penguin Decades)

Product Information

His humor is exhilarating, even when it is dark – maybe especially then – as exemplified by what he wants to put on his tombstone – ‘here lies Billy Fisher’ – in recognition of the lies he cannot help himself from spitting out repeatedly – these range from the serious, maintaining he has a job with the famous comedian Billy Boone and he is going to London, to the futile, pretending he has a dog, sister, even presenting The Witch aka Barbara, one of his three girlfriends, to the mother of his best friend and infuriating her by saying this is his sibling and the woman retorts that she knows Barbara and this lie is insulting. Billy Liar is one of those great literary persons I would like to have as a pub friend . He is a shirker of grandiose ability. He lays in bed every morning and has enumerated his mother's traditional calls up the stairs--the one that usually gets him to finally move is "Your boiled egg will be stone cold!" He amuses himself by saying random irrelevant things to his family members all the while keeping a bizarre running interior dialogue of the things he would like to say in response, and occasionally does. His habitual embroidery of the truth, has left him tangled in a web of pointless lies. He has told: Billy is an employee in an undertaker. He spends the first part of his Saturday morning at work, as everyone did in that era. He strolls around town, goes to the pub, meets a girlfriend or two and then comes down to earth. It’s a special day for Billy because he’s convinced himself that he is about to enter the big time as a comedy writer for a name in London. From start to finish, however, Billy is deluding himself. So this Billy is not particularly likable. His imaginary friend Oscar only seems to be there because Billy has to have an imagination, not because he's funny, which he isn't.

If you're in any more trouble, Billy, it's not something you can leave behind you, you know. You put it in your suitcase, and you take it with you." Is it impossible for Billy to tell the truth, or is he merely a highly intelligent and imaginative youth, trapped in a conventional, working-class, North-of-England, why-you-reading-all-them-bloody-books-you-think-you’re-better-than-your-old-man type of upbringing? Perhaps I’m drawn to that period because I felt like an angry young man too. Maybe there’s more than a little bit of William Fisher in me A major battleground for these tensions is Billy’s imagination, much of it centered on his fantastical country of “Ambrosia.” This word means the food or drink of the gods, which in Greek mythology confers immortality upon whomever consumes it. In the film, “Ambrosia” is effectively where Billy’s heart is, where his dreams run wild, and his ambitions are unfettered. He frequently escapes his dreary home, strict parents, and boring job to an imagined land where he is king, soldier, dictator, celebrated author, and spectacular lover all in one. This marvellous little novel covers a momentous Saturday in the life of nineteen-year-old Billy Fisher in a small town in Yorkshire. It’s 1959, and Billy’s lower-middleclass family wallows in the unchallenging comforts and conformity of dull, mediocre Stradhoughton. Everything is routine and predictable, which to the intelligent and creative Billy is unbearable, and he constantly retreats from the tedium into his inner fantasy world – Ambrosia – where he is a hero in the tradition of Thurber’s Walter Mitty.

Dancing

Billy Liar tells the story of Billy Fisher, a dreamer living in the claustrophobic Yorkshire town in his parents’ house. Billy has dreams, he desperately wants to be a comedy writer and move to London. He doesn’t quite have the courage to go through with it though. The music video for the song " The Importance of Being Idle" by Oasis contains scenes based on scenes from Billy Liar, although most of it is based on the video for the Kinks' Dead End Street.

But Billy doesn’t change: he remains destructively irresponsible, with a childlike immaturity that seems incapable of recognising the inescapable consequences of his actions. In the real world, liars get caught out; thieves get caught; two-timers get dumped. Far from growth, all we see is moral and psychological stagnation. He’s a disaster waiting to happen: he’ll end up in jail or in a psych ward. As well as daydreaming the day away in his beloved Ambrosia, he spends most of his time thinking. Billy has two types of thinking: No.1 thinking which is deliberate, and controlled; and No.2 thinking which consists of obsessive speculation about all the what-if's of life, and to be avoided. It has been suggested that a local newspaper columnist parodied in both the book and the film bears a remarkable resemblance to the late-life Keith Waterhouse himself, when he was ensconced at the Daily Mail. [3] On the surface, Billy Liar is a quirky little British movie portraying a day in the life of William (Billy) Fisher: an irresponsible day-dreamer whose frequent forays into his imaginary world, “Ambrosia,” often supersede his real-life duties and commitments. Billy is a young man who lives with his parents and elderly grandmother in 1960s Yorkshire. He has returned from a selective grammar school to dreary suburbia and his decidedly working-class parents. The resulting educational gap between the generations is obvious. Billy’s day-dreaming and compulsive lying lead to various predicaments, some hilarious and others more tragic. Our protagonist fumbles his way through life without much direction, much to the consternation of those around him. Billy Fisher is a 19-year-old suffocating in a small fictional Yorkshire town and this book covers one day in his life. Billy works as an undertaker's clerk, is nagged by his mother and shouted at by his father, is engaged to two girls but is in love with a third and dreams of becoming a hit comedy writer. Feeling trapped by the monotony of his everyday life Billy frequently disappears into a world of daydreams and lies. Inevitably, Billy's compulsive lies begin to catch up with him.Waterhouse had something of a turbulent childhood and eventful youth himself. He was born and brought up in an impoverished neighbourhood in Leeds and being not so economically privileged meant that he also had to suffer some of the same mediocrity that Billy Billie Liar by Keith Waterhouse provided the latest foray into the world and mores of the late fifties. It’s yet another novel that resides firmly in northern English working class life. But unlike Alan Sillitoe, John Braine or Stan Bairstow, Billy Liar lives almost entirely in the comic. Until, that is, when it doesn’t. He got as far as just outside Birmingham, got a high-rise flat, a dull wife he can't speak to, a drunken mistress he can't get rid of ( 'my Helen problem') and a less than exciting job at the local council.