A fine and authentic slice of late-mid twentieth century lower middle-class English life but the earlier volumes are better
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This is the final instalment of Stan Barstow's well-regarded Vic Brown trilogy as the story of the eponymous working-class non-hero finally runs its course. In A Kind of Loving we were introduced to basically decent, but frustrated every-Englishman Vic Brown who struggles to adapt to adult life and feelings within the moral confines of a conservative, provincial Yorkshire town. Pressured into marrying local girl Ingrid when she becomes pregnant, in The Watchers on the Shore he then tries to make a real go of a marriage within which he is uncomfortable and unhappy. With a view to better providing for his family he takes a job down south but instead gets mixed up with the theatre crowd and meets Donna, the one girl who he feels is just right for him.
In The Right True End he is now successful and after a series of rather grubby affairs, he becomes determined to track down the only woman with whom he felt he had something real. This final book was written some 16 years after A Kind of Loving and it shows. Whereas the earlier books relied on atmosphere and details for a sense of time and place, this work is full of pointers and signposts. It is also written with a fashionable (seventies) crudity and as a result Vic Brown becomes less sympathetic and more laddish and self-centred. The dialogue and the relationships between Vic and his family and small circle of friends are still convincing and work very well. His experiences and feelings will be familiar to many young adults who flounder between adolescence and adulthood and between different social classes. It remains a fine and authentic slice of late-mid twentieth century lower middle-class English life but does not add a great deal to the earlier works.
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