There’s No Pride in Prejudice

By Tony Whelpton

Tony Whelpton’s There’s No Pride in Prejudice (2016) is the sequel to his extremely popular Billy’s War.
You will remember that the hero of the earlier novel was at once cheerful, courageous and charismatic, and Billy displays all those qualities as an adult.
In the later novel we first encounter him briefly as he is being interviewed with a view to becoming an officer in the British Army: he fails the interview because he admits to having been convicted of assault in Paris. In a flashback to the event we learn the background to the incident, Billy’s unwillingness to stand idly by when his French girlfriend is vilified because she is Jewish.
A few years later he is just as ready to demonstrate his rejection of prejudicial stereotypes when he objects to being prevented from sitting with his black American girlfriend on a Greyhound bus. In fact throughout his life he will continue to fight prejudice wherever he finds it, whether it be antisemitism, colour prejudice, anti-gay prejudice or just plain sexism.
Ultimately he becomes an opera singer – and not just a member of the chorus but an international star, which provides him with not only sufficient stature to ensure that his anti-prejudice campaign will be heard but also plenty of opportunity to voice his concerns, because he finds that there is just as much discrimination in the world of opera as in any other field of human activity.
But Billy being Billy, he is universally popular – except among those with whom he is at war – and, as readers of Tony Whelpton’s novels have come to expect, despite the extremely dark moments, Billy’s story is a tale of happiness and success.