Saville won the Booker Prize in 1976. In a novel this vast it is inevitable that the pace will speed up and slow down from time to time, but a book like this can be read for weeks, almost mired in the unfolding phases of Saville’s life. Colin. David Story was born in Wakefield, as was I. It could be argued that his most famous and perhaps still his most successful work is “This Sporting Life”, a portrait of a Rugby League player who achieved local fame and later notoriety as his life. and the career flourishes and then falls apart. It was filmed in the early 1960s, with Richard Harris in the title role. Along with 28,000 others, I was at Wakefield Trinity’s Belle Vue pitch shortly after noon to ensure I had a spot standing by the railings at the side of the pitch to watch Trinity play Wigan in a cup tie. He was only ten years old and needed to get there early because if he had been further back in the crowd he would not have seen anything. Wakefield beat Wigan 5-4, with Fred Smith scoring the only try of the game on my end. They then won at Wembley that year, beating Huddersfield in the game in which Neil Fox used a drop-goal strategy that had not been seen before or since.
But before the cup tie against Wigan, the packed Trinity pitch was turned into a movie set. We were all unpaid extras while Richard Harris and members of Trinity’s second crew shot some action sequences for “This Sporting Life.” I show no disrespect for Richard Harris by recalling that the sequence required a whole series of takes, necessitated by the fact that the star was dropping the ball. I’ve seen the movie several times, but I still haven’t managed to see my legs in shorts behind the poles at the end of Belle Vue. They are there, somewhere.
I deviate greatly from my intended review because Colin, Saville’s central character, could easily have been me, or perhaps my older brother. Like Colin, we grew up in a small Yorkshire mining town. Also like Colin, we went to a primary school and experienced similar tensions and contradictions as a result of social class differences. And again, like Colin, we both became, as a result of that education, something that previous generations of our permanent feeling community had never aspired to, perhaps never even knew existed. Unlike Colin, we don’t aspire to become writers, except of course me, who eventually tried to become one! It was education that changed everything and this aspect of Saville is beautifully portrayed, right down to the visit to old Kingswell’s shop in Wakefield to playfully buy the expensive school uniform, a source of pride for the miner’s family, but also a gauge indicating how lives will inevitably diverge.
Saville also deals with how social mores were changing in the new second half of the 20th century. Colin’s parents simply couldn’t relate to the development of his life, perhaps the hardest thing for them to digest was the individuality he developed and was determined to express. It was a quality you couldn’t pursue when, as poor people, your lives were always interdependent. The communal nature of his poverty made this a desire they could not understand, and at times the pursuit of their own ends was seen by them, perhaps rightly, as wandering selfishness. Of course, we now live in a time where the individual is the norm, the indivisible unit of society, and perhaps where an idea of community is mere nostalgia.
Above all, David Storey’s Saville evokes a time and a place. He too conjures up a language, a dialect that retains the use of you, you, you and yours and, though it occasionally plows, the book’s specialized vocabulary and syntax create the sound of a Yorkshire accent.
Saville has no grand themes, no overtly historical settings in which the characters act out their lives. Rather she focuses on a social and economic environment that was quite peculiar to these mining communities in Yorkshire. But this is the real strength of the book. What we have is a social document, as powerful and yet as specific as some of its nineteenth-century equivalents. Now, after the closure of the wells, although the towns remain, these communities have disappeared to be replaced by environments that offer perhaps less possibility of social mobility or self-esteem than in Saville’s time. This provides an irony that my own novel set in these same places could highlight. But in Saville’s day, the idea that the wells would be closed never crossed anyone’s mind, a fact that makes Colin’s transformation throughout the book remarkable, believable, and yet ultimately sad. , as we now see it effectively driven by necessity, not choice.
August 27, 2007