Saville

Colin Saville is born in a Yorkshire mining village in the 1930s, the eldest surviving son of a pit worker who works nights underground and has decided that his son will not. Everything in the family is arranged around that decision: the scholarship, the grammar school in the town, the uniform they cannot afford, the homework done at a table where nobody else knows what any of it is for. Colin passes exams, becomes a teacher, and finds that education has done exactly what his father intended and rather more, separating him from the village without delivering him anywhere else. Around him are his mother, worn down and watchful, his younger brothers, and a series of relationships he handles badly. Storey writes in a plain, accumulating manner across twenty years, with pages of the flat dialect dialogue in which the family conducts its entire emotional life by indirection. It is a long, unglamorous novel about the cost of social mobility, written by a man who went from a mining family to art school and professional rugby league, and it is unsentimental about what the son owes and what the father has actually bought.