Billy Liar
By Keith Waterhouse
This novel has been sitting on my sister’s bookshelf since her trip to London two
years ago, when she moved out she decided to leave it behind unread. This felt like the
perfect opportunity to read it, so I did some minimal research to see if I would like it. I found
out this book is a classic and it has been adapted into movies, theatre, and even a television
show, so naturally, I was curious as to why. It is full of references to British culture,
Yorkshire’s specifically, which really attracted me to it. Moreover, the idea that one could
easily identify with the main character in many aspects, if not completely, is definitely
appealing.
This story is one of great contradictions, a story that makes you think about your life
choices and how brave you are in order to make changes or let opportunities pass you by. The
main character, Billy Fisher, is an ordinary young man who has to start making decisions
about his future as an adult. This is no easy task for anyone, even less if you think of it in the
late 1950s and your lifelong dream is to become a comedy writer. He struggles everyday with
his suffocating family and job, and to make matters worse he lives in a town that seems to be
dragging everyone down.
Billy Fisher is an intriguing, complicated, sometimes likeable, but more often
infuriating main character, who has a vast, phenomenal imagination. In order to deal with all
his problems, he is constantly escaping into all kinds of imaginary settings he likes to call his
Nº1 thinking. He has a particular recurrent one that is set in an imaginary land called
Ambrosia where he is the president, a famous war hero. Billy walks back and forth a fine line
between reality and fantasy, truths and untruths, but where one begins and the other ends
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