Word: priestley
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DAYLIGHT ON SATURDAY-J. B. Priestley-Harper...
...Author Priestley's best-selling manipulations of sweetness and light (The Good Companions) have neither closed his mind nor cloyed his large public. Daylight on Saturday is a surprisingly successful blend of his new realism and his old sentiment. It reveals a picture of wartime England that will entertain the lighthearted, interest the thoughtful...
Three terse, vivid pages of description open the novel and set the scene. The main factory of Elmdown Aircraft Co. Ltd. comprises acres of windowless con crete camouflaged in a misty hollow in the South Midlands, ten miles from the nearest town. Says Priestley, "take away these drawing offices, these toolmakers' sheds, these long rows of machines, these workers on assembly, and within ten days the whip is at your back. All the brave, drilled men, willing to rush toward death, all the flags and national anthems, all the patriotic speeches, cannot rescue a people now. Without such factories...
...Priestley's novel is not about the factory or the mechanical miracles which materialize in planes. It is about the people who make the planes-their lives, thoughts and hopes. With adroit skill he takes the reader about the plant, from office to assembly line, from drill press to canteen, relating a life history here, sketching a vignette there, until some 50 faces have become recognizable people and the novel's main motifs are weaving the mild suspense which makes Priestley so easy to read...
...Priestley Sentiment. Many character types from earlier Priestley novels reappear in the Elmdown Aircraft factory: Sammy Hamp, whose limp and withered arm accentuates the humility that makes him the happiest man in the place; Edith Shipton, the sex-starved spinster whose shoddy affair with a headmaster is replaced by genuine love for the implacably good Arthur Bolton, whose family and little shop have been obliterated by a Nazi bomb; Sister Filey, in charge of the clinic, whose female vitality is boundless and unbounded by the usual conventions...