Life at the Top

I finished John Braine's Life at the Top, and although it winds up being sour about married life, sour about business life, and sour about adulthood, all notions I can approve, I cannot rate it very highly as a novel compared to Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which combines similar elements with much more architectural skill. The plotting in Braine's novel is weak, with an especially unbelievable final act, and there's not a character in sight that you can invest any emotion in. Braine's attempt to squeeze some real feeling out of the bond between Joe Lampton and his four-year-old daughter turns out oddly creepy; far from charming, the daughter is a demanding little horror.

Because of the success of the great film version of Room at the Top, this sequel was also filmed with Laurence Harvey repeating the lead -- and despite my reservations about the novel, I would of course like to see the film. A few years later, the Joe Lampton character was reprised in a television series called Man at the Top that ran for two years in Britain, with Kenneth Haigh in the lead role. Braine would appear to have been involved (but I'd like more detail on that). The opening sequence of the pilot episode is, wouldn't you know, available on the frequently surprising YouTube:



Haigh's Seventies hair is a mite distracting!