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Saville

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A coal miner's son in the 1940s wins a scholarship to go to grammar school and with it a chance to escape the poverty and narrowness of his upbringing. However, after his graduation he still feels tied to the family and community he came from and at the same time he is estranged from almost everyone in it. He struggles to fulfil his obligations and find meaning and purpose for himself.

When I read my own synopsis of the book it sounds boring and introspective. It is not like that at all. The story is engaging, the prose compelling and the book as a whole, thoroughly memorable. One of the best Booker Prize winners of all. The atmosphere of the book is a little gloomy and the ending is not one that tries to resolve all problems. The book is a portrait of a child and young man caught between two worlds.

Some people may find the very detached third person style of the writing distracting. For example Mr and Mrs Saville are referred to as "his father" and "his mother" when "he" in the same sentence refers to someone other than Colin. This caused me momentary confusion on a few occasions.

When you compare the relative happiness of Colin and his younger brother Stevie its tempting to put this book in the same tradition as Great Expectations and Jude the Obscure where its wrong for working class people to aspire to a higher education and an improvement in conditions. This is not the overall impression of this book. Saville's and Colin's apirations are valid.

By the way if its not available on Amazon.com try Amazon UK its definitely in print there.

Storey's 1976 Booker Prize-winner captures the heart of its characters, draws in the reader, and smoothly traces the life of Colin Saville from his childhood to early adulthood in the small and dying mining village of Saxton. In some ways, Saville is the archetype of all those young people who have used their educations--and some luck--to develop interests which take them beyond their smalltown villages and into the wider world. As Storey shows us, this is not a smooth transition, and it is not done without regrets and feelings of abandoning family ties.

Set during World War II and after, the novel concentrates on daily life as a young boy deals as well as he can with the circumstances of life, even when he has to live with a neighbor for several months because his mother is hospitalized and his father works at night. Always limiting his descriptions to what the main character would observe at various stages of his life, Storey conveys Colin's world realistically, from his embarrassment at having a bath in front of the neighbor woman he stays with to his feeling that "everyone had moved away. At school he was suddenly cut off."

Colin's friends range from Batty and Stringer, two young delinquents who have a "hut" in the woods, to Michael Reagan, a violinist, fat Ian Bletchley, and Stafford, a wealthy boy who befriends him in school. Through them Storey is able to create a realistic novel which also shows what happens to these other, equally typical characters as the post-war years progress. At school Colin is subjected to snobbism, sadistic punishment, and emotional abuse by teachers who seem to regret their own lack of success and their awareness that the class structures of which they have been a part are breaking down. But he survives, making friends, discovering women, and learning about equality, both in terms of women's liberation and in terms of his own potential.

Ultimately, a colleague tells Colin, now an adult, "You don't belong to any class, since you live with one class, respond like another, and feel attachments to none." This breaking up of traditional class structures is Storey's theme, one repeated throughout countries and ages as young people achieve more than their parents, the communal spirit of villages changes, opportunities open up for those who work for them, and life becomes more global. Gracefully written, with not a word out of place, I can not recall when I've found a 500-page book that reads so quickly and so enjoyably. Mary Whipple

Saville won the Booker Prize in 1976. In such a vast novel it is inevitable that the pace will occasionally quicken and slacken, but a book like this can be read over weeks, almost dipped into as the passing phases of Colin's life unfold. David Story was born in Wakefield, and so was I. It could be argued that his most famous and perhaps still most successful work is "This Sporting Life", a portrait of a Rugby League player who achieves local fame and then notoriety as his life and career blossom and then fall apart. It was filmed in the early 1960s, with Richard Harris playing the starring role. Along with about 28000 others, I was in Wakefield Trinity's Belle Vue ground soon after midday to make sure that I got a standing place by the railings next to the pitch to see Trinity play Wigan in a cup-tie. I was only ten and needed to be early because, had I been further back amongst the crowd, I would have seen nothing. Wakefield beat Wigan 5-4, with Fred Smith scoring the only try of the game at my end. They went on to win at Wembley that year, beating Huddersfield in the game where Neil Fox used a drop goal strategy not seen before or since.

But before that cup-tie against Wigan, the packed Trinity ground became a film set. We were all unpaid extras as Richard Harris and members of the Trinity second team filmed some actions Sequences for "This Sporting Life". I show no disrespect for Richard Harris by recalling that the sequence required a whole string of takes, necessitated by the fact that the star kept dropping the ball! I have seen the film several times, but I have not yet managed to spot my short-trousered legs behind the sticks at the Belle Vue end. They are there, somewhere.

I digress at length from my intended review because Colin, the central character of Saville, could easily have been me, or perhaps my older brother. Like Colin we were brought up in a small Yorkshire mining village. Also like Colin we went to a grammar school and experienced similar tensions and contradictions as a result of social class differences. And again like Colin we both became, as a result of that education, something previous generations of our permanent-feeling community had never aspired to, perhaps never knew existed. Unlike Colin, we did not aspire to become writers, except of course for me, who eventually tried to become one! It was the education that changed everything and this aspect of Saville is beautifully portrayed, right down to the visit to the old Kingswell's shop in Wakefield to buy the ludicrously expensive school uniform, a source of pride for the miner's family, but also a pointer indicating how lives will inevitably diverge.

Saville also deals with how social mores were changing in the new second half of the twentieth century. Colin's parents simply could not relate to how his life was developing, perhaps finding hardest to stomach the individuality that he developed and was determined to express. It was a quality you could not pursue when, as poor people, your lives were always inter-dependent. The communal nature of their poverty made this a desire they could not comprehend and occasionally his pursuit of his own ends was seen by them - perhaps quite rightly - as errant selfishness. Of course, we now live in an age where the individual is the norm, the indivisible unit of society and, perhaps, where an idea of community is mere nostalgia.

Above all else David Storey's Saville evokes a time and a place. It also evokes a language, a dialect that preserves the use of thee, thy, thou and thine and, although occasionally laboured, the book's specialised vocabulary and syntax create the sound of a Yorkshire twang.

Saville has no vast themes, no overtly historical settings against which the characters enact their lives. Rather it concentrates on a social and economic setting which was quite peculiar to these mining communities in Yorkshire. But this is the book's real strength. What we have is a social document, as powerful and yet as specific as some of its nineteenth century equivalents. Now, after the closure of the pits, though the villages remain, these communities have disappeared to be replaced by settings that perhaps offer less chance of social mobility or self-respect than in Saville's time. This provides and irony that my own novel set in these same places might bring into focus. But in Saville's time, the idea that the pits would close never entered anyone's head, a fact which makes Colin's transformation through the book remarkable, credible and yet ultimately sad, since we now see it as effectively driven by necessity, not choice.

27 August 2007