Careful your are treading on my memories.
|
|
I read A kind of Loving in the late Fifties and was immediately a Fan. It was very much a novel of the Fifties. To me what was remarkable was it's realistic portrayal of Working Class life. It was exactly as it was, as I now remember it. I read the sequel The Watchers on the Shore as soon as I could. It is a novel of the Sixties and very much reflects attitudes of the time. Barstow is a fine Story Teller but for those who are interested in our social Past please read and take note. All is true. The attitudes to Sex, the Stigma of being Pregnant and Single, the pressure to marry, the attitude of Parents, even the portrayal of the Drawing Office is just so real. This a fine book, whilst at times it can be very serious it is full of humour, but read A Kind of Loving first.
|
|
Working-class non-hero
|
|
The fact that the social structure of England has changed out of all recognition over the last half century does not make the earlier era more desirable but it does make it more interesting. For those interested in history the plot of Watchers on the Shore takes place at a time when the English working-class still existed, before three quarters moved up a notch into the home-owning lower middle-classes and the rest slipped backwards into the welfare trap. Stan Barstow draws on a world a little more downmarket than that of Alan Bennett but the principal character is no brooding, working-class anti-hero full of boiling class resentment. In A Kind of Loving we were introduced to Vic Brown, a basically decent but immature and unworldly young working man, living a narrow, provincial Yorkshire life. In this, the sequel, he is unhappily married to the girl that he got pregnant in the first book. After losing his job in a shop he takes a position as an engineering draughtsman in the Home Counties with the intention of finding somewhere to live for him and his wife. Instead, he gets involved with the theatre set where he lives and has an affair with a rather loose actress. A man, like many, who allows his physical desires to override his good sense, this precipitates complications which change his life. The story is simple, the prose straightforward and direct, and the experiences common to most of us from whatever socio-economic group. This is a book which describes the ordinary life of an ordinary man, but with extraordinary clarity and emotional honesty.
|
|
|
United States | 
United Kingdom | 
Canada