Review Summaries

• Readers praise its honest portrayal of family and class tensions, though some find the leisurely pace and length demanding. Overall, the restrained prose and social observation are widely valued.

• Its finely observed characters and sense of place stand out, leaving a strong aftertaste. The novel is valued for the calm but searching way it examines domestic pressure and class difference.

Reviews

• A book that I don't want to end

  I am in the middle of this epic read. A few years back I came across the 1960s novel Stoner, by John Williams, which took the reader through a man's whole life and in so doing managed to describe an era of US history. Saville does the same but speaks to me more, even though the canvass is smaller, being a small mining community in Yorkshire. David Storey was a master of dialogue. Highly recommended.

• Booker-Prize, rightly deserved

  This novel won the (Man) Booker Prize in 1976. You can rely on catching real good novels since the Booker Prize is awarded - as distinct from e.g. the (maybe wrongly) higher estimated Nobel Prize - explicitly for on work: for the best book in English from authors of the Commonwealth or Ireland. Some are good and some are very good. Personally (I read all of the 40 winning novels), I would rank it within the ten best winners. In any case it is a brillant, moving and realistic derscription of rural life.

• Store's Booker Prize Novel

  A brilliant coming of age novel about the rigors of growing up in the coal towns of northern England, fighting for advancement through a stifling social climate, and the value of education in breaking the class barrier.

• The purpose of life is not definable.

  Be advised, this is not a page turner. It is a finely crafter story of character, place, time, and events told with superbly restrained style. It is England of the mid 20th century. Never does author David Storey take us into flights of picturesque language and tiring detail. His characters speak and they come to life from the page gradually and develop consistently. The tension builds as the tale unfolds and our attention is held by the confidence we feel in the writer's mastery of his narrative. There is poetry, splendid poetry, but it comes from the voices we hear and their need to express. It is in the dialect (the speech of the working classes of the English mining district), and no glossary is provided but that we devise for ourselves, and easily, from this reader's experience. Sentiment is precious and kept under control, and it's only in the final pages of the tale did I feel the deep tug in the gut, the tug of regret and loss of what might have been, and the sad desire that better might still come. The ending is like that.

• A book about class

  I am up to 1976 in my quest to read all the Booker Prize winners. This is not a book I would ever have chosen to read, but I'm glad I did. It is the story of one young man's efforts to 'better himself,' largely to the pressure put upon him by his father, a miner, who wants something else for his son. The result is a young man who is not at home in his world. The novel is very much about class. The protagonist cannot be content in his father's world of working in a mine, living in housing provided for him and his family. But he is not at home in the middle class, either. The world of teaching is wrong for him; the world of physical labor is closed to him. As a result, he a restless spirit doomed to be unhappy wherever he is. I think he should move to America.

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