'The Glittering Prizes'

      Perhaps one or twice a year I have had enough.  I concede defeat.  A novel is put aside unfinished.  It is a sort of failure, there is a lingering thought that it just might get better, but sometimes one just cannot continue reading it.  It has become unbearable.

     Last month was one of those times.  The book in question: 'The Glittering Prizes', by Frederick Raphael, published in 1976.  On the Penguin paperback edition of the actor Tom Conti as the main character Adam Morris, from the BBC adaptation 0f 1976.  I mean I wanted to like it.  Being set in post-war Cambridge I thought it might offer some incite into University life.  It may well have, but I can't get over the unlikeable, irritating characters. (Perhaps that's the point, perhaps that's the way they're meant to be) Not only that, they are all of an amorphous lump.  The best part was Adam's friendship with his fellow undergrad Donald - a sort of anti-Brideshead Revisited - it really was affecting.  But then we were back to University life....

     I tried the BBC adaptation in the hope it might help, and some extent it did, but it was spoilt by Tom Conti's 'mannered' performance.