My Alfie Collection

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Bill Naughton wrote the screenplay, based on his theatre play some time before. In the same year as the movie’s release, he published the novel. It is very faithful to the film’s narrative, or vice versa, but as a novel and even with the film’s regular breaking of the fourth wall, the book delves slightly deeper into Alfie’s thoughts and musings. Shorter scenes are given length and detail. Idiosyncratic turn of phrases are added which are really quite funny - I don’t think these all appear in the film - and the ending is different but not too much. A woman told me she once went paralysed down one side of her face forcing herself to laugh at her old man’s jokes what she’d heard two million times. Yes, you make a married woman laugh and you’re halfway there. Course it doesn’t work with a single bird. It’ll set you off on the wrong foot. You get one of them laughing and you don’t get nothing else.

Words and pictures merge seamlessly in these simply devised books. Shirley Hughes, now 78, wrote and illustrated her first Alfie book in 1981. Twenty years on, Alfie and Annie Rose are still respectively four and one-and-a-half years old but show no sign at all of dating. Sin embargo la masculinidad de Alfie y su misoginia se antojan aquí como un mecanismos de defensa y evasión, contra la vida, la juventud que se escapa cada día y la maldición esa de despertar solo en cama, o peor aún, con alguien que no te puede importar menos. An Evening at Alfies - A leak from the water tank causes problems when Alfie's Mum and Dad are out and the Babysitter has to get her parents round to help. Rearing? He means raring. Alfie is not well educated, it must be said. He’s a bit of a barrow boy.) Alfie Gives a Hand - Alfie gets invited to a birthday party, where the birthday boy is naughty and Alfie comforts a crying girl.If there’s two things I like to do, then the first thing is having it away with a nice old married bird, they’re so much more grateful than the single ones, I have found, and the second thing is chewing somebody’s ear off about all the interesting observations I have made about life. When I say life, course, I generally mean the old how’s your father and the ways you can get yourself set up just lovely. If you’re a bloke that is. But even if you’re a bird all is not lost. You just have to figure out a few of the basics and you’ll be okay too. But for blokes, this is the way I think it should go.

While not deep in a Jamesian sense or daring in the Joycean, ALFIE is a very good, book-length interior monologue. If a reader gets nothing from it other than a sense of urban British slang in the post-World War Two era, Alfie is a memorable book. But it is, I think, a realistic portrait of a man whose outmoded view of the world keeps him from fully participating in it. He always wants to impose his rules on it, not merely because he is selfish, which he is, but because he has been raised in ignorance of the coming changes. He is corrupt, but that is not what makes him different from others. What makes him different is his awareness that he is despised for his inability to climb socially. People from exactly his class are getting ahead for the first time in many years. He is not going to get ahead. His peers are leaving him behind. The intimate and uplifting memoir from one of Britain's most loved singers - this is Alfie, off stage.

What is it going to take for this man to finally grow up, to for once value what a woman is? When I finally came to a culminating event in Alfie’s life, I almost started hyperventilating just reading about it and then became sad that this is what it was going to have to take to make Alfie finally grow up. But oddly, Alfie makes a statement that started me on an uncontrollable fit of laughter. Instead of being sad or disgusted at what was going on, I found myself laughing hard at the fact that even after all this Alfie did not grasp the seriousness of what had just happened to him. And then I had to ask myself why I was laughing at something so serious. What is wrong with me? This is a book where I would like to read a sequel to find out what happens to Alfie as he gets older. Does he finally grow up? I think it's interesting that the play and film script came before it was adapted into a book, as usually it's the other way around. Despite Alfie's narcissism and his hideous treatment of his birds, there is something charismatic about him and even when he's at his absolute worst there's something redeeming there.

And Alfie is Michael Caine. His is the voice you hear in your head as you read this speedy, funny, sad, piquant swinging London novel. No one else could possibly do. Having thought about it in the last few months, I'm not sure I like the term “unreliable narrator”, especially the way it's often used on Goodreads - a way of dismissing certain types of characters [and by implication real people who resemble them]. Is anyone's self awareness 100%? Must people outwardly demonstrate exhaustive awareness of their contradictions at all times to please those who place themselves in judgement? Does any first-person account really contain full understanding of others' experiences of the same situation? And words and concepts have slightly different meanings to people within their own personal subculture (created out of what they know, whether that's friends and family, what they've read and watched etc). “Thieving” in the idiolect of Alfie and his mates – and his dad and step-mum who've fenced goods for him down the pub – evidently has a particular meaning narrower than it does in the eyes of the law and people who would never pilfer.

Alfie is a turtle - one who disappears. This book, which is really two stories, tells the tale of Nia, who got a turtle for her 6th birtday, and Alfie, the turtle, who went exploring and was gone for a full year. Alfie's Feet - Alfie is taken to the shop to buy Welly Boots, He puts them on himself, but on the wrong feet. Finding a battered Panther edition of this classic story that typifies London of a certain period whilst wandering around London "on business" seemed like fate, I can't say it helped me to appreciate the novel or the city more or less than if I'd read it at any other time but it was an enjoyable time nonetheless.

Alfie Gets in First - Alfie runs in the front door ahead of his Mum and slams the door behind him, causing a minor upset on the street before Alfie manages to open it for himself again.If you ever wanted to know what goes on the mind of a man who treats women badly, just read this. Though it was written in the 1960s, it is still timely for understanding men like Harvey Weinstein.