Word: coline
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...SAVILLES' RELIGION is, in fact, upward mobility, and it is this which is to be their gift to Colin. To evade the mines, the eternal sameness and the dirt of pit life--for this, his parents' goal, Colin must struggle to harmonize the different requirements of village and school. The task is almost impossible. Returning home by bus while his more prosperous schoolmates take the train, Colin encounters an increasing demand for sacrifice and his parents' barely concealed scorn for the life they have foisted...
Love is no kinder to Colin. Keeping company with the feminist Margaret--who believes she can balance her womanhood and her career ambitions--Colin finds himself incapable of performing a similar balancing act. As the relationship deepens, he begins to see the poverty and dreariness of his origins through her eyes--clearly enough to understand why she leaves him for his glib, middle-class friend Stafford. But that understanding serves only to deepen his anger and his isolation...
...Storey's characters move. The landscape Storey describes is not only social, but literary: beside the stolidity of a Lawrentian mining village, he sets the formal rigidity of a Dickensian public school, with its masters almost comic in their severity. Through this landscape flits the mystical figure of Stafford, Colin's foil, who, like Dickens' Steerforth, sloughs off the spoils of his prosperity and talent with the same ease with which they accrue...
Stafford's facility finds its parallel in Storey's own gift for creating character and scene. Storey's style is unobtrusive; but the sense of reality which eludes Colin is all about him, in Storey's precise depiction of the fictional world he inhabits. The effects in Saville are rarely obvious; our passport into Colin's dilemma is understatement and the slow accumulation of detail. Storey uses strings of adjectives almost lovingly. Writing of Colin's mother, he says: "It was as if her life had flooded out, secretly, without their knowledge, and she some helpless agent, watching this dissolution...
OFTEN, in contemporary novels, the protagonist sees his identity as bound up in the past, in the acknowledgement of his roots. Colin too suspects that his identity derives from the world he has left behind, and he is constantly looking back, hoping it will overtake him. But when he turns toward Saxton, his home, he finds it empty of meaning, as insensible as the coal to which his father has mortgaged his existence. "It's no good hanging on," Colin finally tells the older woman he deserts, with sudden insight. The alternative, beautifully inevitable in Saville, is to walk fearlessly...