The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge

Published 1974 · 170 pages · 42,500 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is The Bottle Factory Outing to read?

The Bottle Factory Outing scores 53 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 50 out of 100
British working class.
Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
Bainbridge's clear prose.
Abstraction: 52 out of 100
Class, romance, death.
Information density: 50 out of 100
London factory.
Narrative indirection: 52 out of 100
Third person.
Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
Factory, outing.
Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
Dark comedy.
Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
Shocking ending.
Structural complexity: 48 out of 100
Short, compact.

How The Bottle Factory Outing is regarded

The Bottle Factory Outing holds a literary regard score of 56 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

About the author

Beryl Bainbridge