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hero again appears to have married the beautiful `Princess' and 'succeeded to the kingdom'. When a New York multi-millionaire buys the Worldwide Studios where Glick works, the hero schemes to ensure that he is appointed allpowerful head of the studio, overthrowing the kindly father-figure who had previously been his champion and protector; and the story concludes with the spectacular Hollywood wedding in which Glick marries the new owner's 'aristocratic' daughter. But there is no way, with such a dark hero, this could be the end of the story. Finally comes the twist to the tale, where in the middle of the party to celebrate the wedding, Glick goes upstairs in his mansion to find his equally cold-hearted, self-centred bride enjoying sex with a stupid but handsome young film star. Unabashed, she tells him the marriage was just a mutually-advantageous social arrangement. Temporarily, Glick's fantasy world is in ruins. But as the book ends, he has already retreated behind the armour of his all-consuming egocentricity, `running' as hard as ever. As in Bel Ami, we realise the cardboard hero has not inwardly changed at all. In no way is the story finally resolved.

A'lesser dark version' which even more overtly alluded to the symbolism of the fairy tale was that British best-seller of the late 1950s, John Braine's Room at the Top (1957). Joe Lampton, an orphaned young man, arrives to seek his fortune in a big Yorkshire town. He is as two-dimensional and egocentric as `Bel Ami' and Sammy Glick, although without their talents for self-advancement. He soon spots from afar the `Princess' who represents all his ambition requires, Susan, the pretty, silly young daughter of a rich local businessman. At first she seems quite out of reach, and he muses:

`Susan was a princess and I was the equivalent of a swineherd. I was, you might say, acting out the equivalent of a fairy story. The trouble was that there were more difficult obstacles than dragons and enchanters to be overcome, and I could see no sign of a fairy godmother.'

Almost immediately, however, a `fairy godmother' (or at any rate a `Mother') comes into Lampton's life, in the shape of Alice Aisgill, a warm-hearted, married older woman. She begins to `transform' him, although of course only externally, by smoothing away some of his social gaucheries and teaching him to use hair cream; and soon he is taking his `Princess' out to social occasions, while the affair with `Mother' continues in the background:

`I was taking Susan not as Susan but as a Grade A lovely and the daughter of a factory owner, as the means to obtaining the Aladdin's cave of my ambitions.'

In fact Susan is a classic instance of the kind of infantile anima figure who might be fantasised into existence by someone suffering from `Mother-dominated' emotional immaturity. She begins to respond to the advances of her `Joekins' (reminiscent of the infantile Dora Spenlow's pet-name `Doady' for David Copperfield), but throws him over when she discovers that he is still tied to Alice ('Mother'). Joe and Alice travel down to Dorset for four days of love-making ('that night and the nights that followed I learned all about a woman's body and my own'), ending with Joe's sickly declaration `I do love you Alice. I'll love you till the day I die. You're my wife now. There'll never be anyone else.'

On their return to Yorkshire, Joe at once wins Susan back and makes her pregnant. Her father offers to find his now prospective son-in-law a highly paid new job:

`I was a Prince Charming - every obstacle had been magically smoothed from my path.'

`Prince Charming' tells `Mother' what has happened, and that their affair is over. She gets drunk, runs her car off the road and is crushed to an unrecognisable pulp. Truly in such fantasies has the world of the fairy tale been turned in our time inside out.

Rags to Riches: The sentimental version

When we talk of `sentimentality, we mean the false version of something real; the counterfeit of something which can inspire proper human emotions. Sentimentality plays with our emotions.