Word: storeys
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SAVILLE by David Storey...
Saville's emotional barrenness seems the result of the meanness of life in the village. He has no political instincts, and Novelist Storey (This Sporting Life and the play The Changing Room) is not pamphleteering. But his moving novel is what used to be called a social document; it demonstrates with harrowing examples that there is nothing ennobling about desperate and ill-paid labor...
...Storey's method is that of the playwright: character and plot emerge mainly through dialogue, backed up by simple, controlled description. Blatant authorial intrusions are rare. Like his Victorian predecessors, Storey remains outside his characters, looking in; he avoids interior monologues, allo ing the feelings of his characters to surface in their words and actions. Colin is the focal point of the novel--Mr. and Mrs. Saville are always referred to as "his father" and "his mother" even when the antecedent is unspecified--but Storey refuses to lose himself in a single point of view, preferring the role...
...century Midlands, Saville tells its story of individual alienation within the larger story of a society in transformation. The bleakness of the depression years, the depredations of world war, the nationalization of the mines--these provide the backdrop against which 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...
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...