This review has been hard to write, because this book has been extremely difficult to read. This is a personal thing on my part, because I have always found novels that describe childhood in school to be difficult, mainly because my latter years in school were not always pleasant. Saville talks about school life in spades, and a difficult school life at that. It tells the tale of Colin Saville, son of a coal miner in a 1930s Northern British mining village, who wins a scholarship to the prestigious local grammar school, and his subsequent struggle to build a life for himself in spite of his family’s grinding poverty. Colin tries to fit in with the other boys at the grammar school but his humble origins are constantly shown up and his inability to fit in alienates him from his peers and his family, leaving him with nowhere to go.
Saville is unremittingly grim. The oppressive landscape of the coal mines looms large over everything and acts as a metaphor for the hard life and poverty that Colin and his family have to live through. Here the reader witnesses people having to pay for their medical treatment prior to the creation of the NHS, the struggle to stay warm in sub-standard housing and the exhaustion suffered from constant physically demanding hard work. The coal dust settles on everything and everywhere is grimy and dark, even when Colin’s mother tries to keep the house clean.
Education is seen as Colin’s escape from all this, and his passing of the eleven-plus grammar school entrance examination seems to be his ticket out, but as the novel progresses his tale does not pan out that way. We see the changes in Colin’s peers, their successes and failures, as Colin himself grows up. He becomes alienated from those around him, his family and his friends, and as a character he is hard to warm to because he barely speaks at all. Storey has created a protagonist who is an everyman character, a figurehead for the class struggle, and his complicated friendship with the upper-middle class boy Stafford reflects the differences between their two worlds but tells us little about Colin’s own feelings, wants or desires.
I did not enjoy reading Saville. I found it grim, depressing and unrelenting in its misery. The school passages made me feel deeply uncomfortable and the story only got interesting very near the end when it was abruptly terminted. I could write more for this review but don’t feel the need. If, like me, you read for escapism, this really is not going to be the book for you.
