The fall of the sparrow / Nigel Balchin

by Nigel Balchin

Near fine copy in the original gilt-blocked cloth. Slightest suggestion only of dust-dulling to the spine bands and panel edges. Remains particularly well-preserved overall; tight, bright, clean and strong. From the library of Eric George Hatfield Moody with his personalized bookplate to front pastedown. ; 8vo 8" - 9" tall; 318 pages; Physical 318 p. 22 cm. Fiction -- Fictional Characters -- Texts.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1955

About the author

Trained originally as an industrial psychologist, in which capacity he helped Rowntree’s to successfully launch Black Magic chocolates in 1933, Nigel Balchin first received critical acclaim as a novelist during the Second World War when he wrote Darkness Falls From the Air. It was the first of three evocative novels (including the smash-hit The Small Back Room) that made good use of his wartime employment experiences at the Ministry of Food and later in the army. This trio was followed by a stream of other fine novels, such as A Sort of Traitors, Sundry Creditors and The Fall of the Sparrow. Balchin diversified into film scriptwriting after the war, winning a BAFTA for his work on The Man Who Never Was and penning what he whimsically described as “the first folio edition of Cleopatra”, being his original (unused) script for the Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor epic. When Balchin died in 1970, at the age of 61, the Guardian anointed him “the novelist of men at work”, a fitting epithet for one of the best fiction writers of the twentieth century.

Reviews

[Bill]

Unfortunately, The Fall Of The Sparrow by Nigel Balchin was a Not Finish (NF) for me. It's too bad because I enjoyed a previous book (The Small Back Room very much. Could I have finished it. Sure, it wasn't too long of a book, 300 pages, but I didn't particularly like any of the characters and really, the story didn't seem to be going anywhere. Too easy to put down.

Basically, the story is about one Jason Pellew and follows his life from childhood to adulthood. It starts with his being in court and sentenced for crime against friends and acquaintances. The story then moves into his childhood and where I gave up, he was in college. The story is told by a childhood friend, Payne, who runs into Jason throughout his life it seems.

Anyway... that's about all I can tell you. It's probably a better book than I give it credit for and ultimately I might have liked it more if I'd finished it. So, No rating (NR) and a DNF from me.

[CQM · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a cracking read, I fairly bowled through this. I don't think it can be said too often that Balchin is eminently readable.
The Fall of the Sparrow concerns Jason Pellew and opens as his friend and our narrator Henry Payne watches as Pellew is on trial and facing a couple of years in prison for various crimes such as stealing a car, passing dud checks and selling the contents of another chaps flat in which he was staying.
Payne then takes us back to childhood when he first meets Pellew. They are near neighbors and end up at the same school. Henry is a couple of years older than Jason and he tries to look out for him without getting too involved. Years later they are at Cambridge together and break up fascist black shirt meetings with the communists. Still later we see them in the blitz and their wartime exploits. Finally after the war there is Jason's marriage to a wholly unsuitable woman. The point of the story seems to be Henry's attempts to understand why Jason should have fallen from grace so completely.
I loved the minor characters and felt genuinely upset at the fate of some of them while the main players are brilliantly drawn messy human beings.
A five star beauty that should be ranked up with The Small Back Room and Darkness Falls From the Air.

[LizTrue · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some books I can read over and over again and this is one of them. This is the story of two men, Henry Payne and Jason Pellow. They are both born into well-to-do middle class families, attend the same school and university and serve in the second world war. Henry (the narrator), although somewhat dull, performs as expected throughout all this, but Jason's path through life is much more uneven. His childhood is unstable. He courts controversy. He makes rash and extreme decisions. He seems to have multiple personalities, and collects an odd assortment of friends, most of whom are colourful characters who exist on the fringe of society in some way. Most do not seem good for Jason and more than one exploit him.

Henry tries to help Jason but his own comfortable upbringing and life makes it difficult for him to understand or address the deep-rooted issues that are driving Jason and causing him to act as he does. He has little understanding or liking for Jason's other friends and has a particularly tense relationship with Jason's girlfriend Leah, a feisty leftwing political activist. Leah does care for Jason but she is as helpless as Henry when it comes to helping him cope with life.

Jason suffers badly from the consequences of his unstable personality and actions but even so, we get the sense that Henry, in taking safer, more conventional options in life, is missing out in some way. He reacts angrily when he discovers Leah and Jason sleep together. Is it jealousy and if so, is he jealous of Jason or Leah - or jealous of their experience? He doesn't seem to know.

Jason's story is a harsh example of what can happen when someone is too emotionally damaged to understand and play by the rules of the society they live in. The price he pays is high, and although he is often exasperating he is also tragic. This is an absorbing and thought-provoking read.

[David Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nigel Balchin writes as well as anyone about the quiet desperation of people struggling to somehow survive the experience of living through World War Two.
This tale is narrated by Henry Payne, a character we get to know little of (people continually get his name wrong and is completely conventional) and his recurrent encounters with one Jason Pellew, initially as a reluctant childhood Sunday lunchtime visitor, then as pupils at the same public school, followed by Cambridge University and the army during the war. Jason is the only child of a bullying and ignorant retired soldier and his put-upon meek wife. Jason, small with a cherubic countenance and a mop of golden hair, survives by escaping to a fantasy world and is forever given to telling easily disproveable tall stories about his whereabouts or actions (role model for Boris perhaps). He is uncertain about his sexuality and forever in debt which leads to many complications - indeed the prologue suggests that he is likely to spend some time in jail having pleaded guilty to a number of unforgivable crimes. It’s really about the descent into madness of a confused and unhappy young man who, in spite of the slightly shoulder-shrugging support of his acquaintances - he has no close friend - fails to wish to be understood, sympathised with or helped. There are no cosy or simple answers; the author is unflinching with regard to the chances of surviving the war.
The cast of rather eccentric characters is wonderfully drawn, the only normal people seem to be the narrator and his amused friend Jackson who, as a psychiatrist, perhaps gets closest to figuring out what on Earth is going on with Jason.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

i read this a couple of years ago, but i'm not sure why...perhaps it was the picture of the judge on the cover. i think i was on the wrong tram from the start, thinking the main protagonist was the narrator, when it was really Jason Pellew. i think. anyway i read the whole thing feeling confused, and wondering if it would ever lead to anything significant, and it didn't. but there is something hypnotic about the way nigel balchin writes, and though i finished "the fall of the sparrow" wondering what was that all about?, i felt i wanted to read more by him. this lead me to the more enjoyable "mine own executioner", the vastly better "the small back room", and the wonderful, "darkness falls from the air". there are others i want to read, but apparently the standard deteriorated towards the end (damn you evil alcohol)

as i read more of balchin, i realised his great strength lies in his dialogue. his characters are so witty and frank to each other, and nobody ever gets offended. maybe i just wish that real life was like that. and his narrators are SO intelligent, but invariably modest, put-upon, somehow broken, and likeable.

i'm going to read "the fall of the sparrow" again, just as a thank you for sending me to nigel balchin's other books, and hopefully with an insight that will allow me to appreciate the story better.

i might even like it this time.

[Vicki · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was intrigued by the title of this book, taken from Matthew's gospel, "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father." Matt 10.29
We follow the fortunes, and more often than not, the misfortunes of Jason Pellew and his fall from a life of seeming advantage to one of disrepute. The device of opening and closing with his court case with his story narrated by a childhood friend between the summing up of the judge and the delivering of the verdict was intriguing. The final words of the book are telling. I enjoyed this book very much and look forward to reading more from the same author.

[Alicia Rudd · Rating 4 out of 5]

A highly patriarchal story which excavates the old aristocratic world-order and portrays the privileged, privately educated university Oxbridge days of public beatings and unquestioning obedience alongside the isolationist realities of characters with no other understanding of the world which can leave them vulnerable to the storms life inevitably brings them. The narrative is a little overly complicated but cleverly embeds itself into the reader's mind so they begin to realise how far removed people become when they do not have the mechanisms in place that privilege and connection rely upon to succeed.

[Ben Bergonzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grimly comical account of Jason, a floundering misfit who happens to be brave during the war (until he breaks down), but ends up in court for fraud, told in the voice of his steady scientist friend Henry. The story follows the characters from their early teens to their forties. Immensely readable and enjoyable, brilliant dialogue as always with Balchin. Being less of a thriller and more of a character-driven saga, it is something of an outlier in his body of work. Despite an interesting framing structure where the whole biography is given as a flashback from the courtcase, the plot is rather 'one damn thing after another' and the ending seems a little rushed and lacks any surprise. Still the psychological situation is fascinating. Jason's girlfriend Leah is one of the most thoroughly-realised of Balchin's female characters. Recommended.

[Margareth8537 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Preferred his earlier books