There weren’t any whippets or homing pigeons in David Storey’s Saville. Apart from that I don’t think there was a single cliché about Northern working class life that it avoided, from trouble at mill, musically gifted lad bullied by his dad for being in touch with his feminine side, people dying of rickets and on and on and on – it was just so overwhelming the It’s Grim up North relentlessness of it all.

It all starts so well:

“Towards the end of the third decade of the present century a coal haulier’s cart, pulled by a large, dirt-grey horse, came into the narrow streets of the village of Saxton, a small mining community in the low hill-land of south Yorkshire.”

This has strong echoes of D H Lawrence, but equally of an earlier novelist of rural working class lives, Thomas Hardy:

“On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor.”

But it doesn’t last, and we are quickly pitched into the minutiae of depressingly deprived life in the Yorkshire mining villages. Colin Saville is the bright but emotionally stunted son of the coal-miner and his timid wife, who passes the eleven-plus and sees education as a possible route out of the poverty-stricken life of his parents. My guess is that the narrative is principally autobiographical, because nothing else would seem to justify the sheer volume of pointless detail crammed into the novel’s 550 pages. For most of the novel Colin is a passive figure – events happen to him but he seems to have no agency, no personality. Towards the end of the novel a personality of sorts emerges, and Colin becomes a distinctly less-likeable individual, fighting with his family and treating the women in his life with disrespect and contempt.

While there are events in the novel – the Second World War starts in the background and continues to its conclusion while only minimally intruding on Colin’s day to day life – they are largely a distraction from the recording of every last detail of his existence. To be fair, if one grew up in a mining village in the thirties and forties I am sure the war would have seemed very distant, especially as miners were exempt from conscription. Colin seems to spend most of the novel either riding on a bus (trains being too expensive), waiting for a bus, going to catch a bus, or talking about all of the above. No detail of his tedious life is too irrelevant to be excluded from the narrative. He goes for a walk in the park, cleans the windows, washes the dishes, meets a girl – but feels nothing, or reveals nothing about what he thinks and feels.

The novel does a good job of capturing the confusion and mysteriousness of childhood. Things happen and are accepted without explanation. Colin’s mother, for example, suffers several illnesses and hospital spells which are never explained. Colin is warned that when he goes to grammar school that older boys will flush his head in the toilets. He spends hours practising holding his breath in preparation for this ritual, but when school starts and the threatened humiliation never happens, the danger is quickly forgotten.

There’s an ambivalence about working class life in Saville best encapsulated by the obsession with dirt and cleaning. Miners and their families are both perpetually filthy and constantly cleaning:
“A bucket of water stood by the hearth; in the top of it floated a wooden scrubbing-brush. The carpet had been rolled up in front of the fire and the stone floor between there and the door opening to the yard scrubbed clean. There was a smell of soap in the room, overlain by the musty, almost stifling odour which came from the bed.” This duality of dirt and cleanliness/cleaning comes to act as a symbol for Colin’s relationship with his family and his community – he is desperate to escape, but feels chained to home and parents. He turns down the chance to go to university, instead opting for a local teacher training college which allows him to remain at home, contributing to family income.

Misery memoirs became more popular later in the twentieth century – Saville is an early example of the genre. Some reviewers have seen the novel as a political statement, but if it is it is highly ambivalent. Communism is mentioned cynically as being irrelevant to the lives of the miners. There is no suggestion that the Attlee government of the post-war years had any impact on their lives apart from a passing mention of the nationalisation of the mines, which surely can’t have been right – free healthcare for the miners and families would have been transformative, and the state of Colin’s mother’s health meant it would have had an immediate beneficial impact.

I haven’t said this for a while, but sometimes I read these novels so you don’t have to. Saville was grim and cliched and while not a hard read it did make me want to bury myself in something joyful and entertaining for a week or so before returning to the Booker winners of the 1970s.