Saville
by David Storey
Summary
Colin Saville is born in the late 1930s in a South Yorkshire mining village, the second son of a miner who has decided that his children will not go down the pit. Everything in the family is organised around that decision: the scholarship, the grammar school in town, the books, the expectation.
The novel follows Colin from infancy to his late twenties, and it is the education that does the damage. Grammar school gives him a vocabulary his parents do not have and cannot follow. He becomes a teacher, which is what the plan required, and finds he belongs neither in the village nor in the world the scholarship was supposed to open, and that he can no longer speak to his father in a way either of them recognises.
Storey writes it at length and at a deliberate pace, in flat unadorned prose with a great deal of dialogue and very little interior commentary. It runs to around five hundred pages and covers thirty years without dramatic incident.
That plainness is the point and it is also the barrier. Readers who want a novel to move will find it slow. Readers who want the fullest account in English of what upward mobility costs a working class family, told from inside it, will find nothing better.
Best read in long sittings rather than snatched chapters, since the accumulation is the whole effect. Readers who liked Sons and Lovers or the novels of Alan Sillitoe will recognise the territory, rendered at greater length and with far less consolation.
Historical Context & Significance
Saville won the Booker Prize in 1976.
Storey remains the only professional rugby league player to have won the prize. He signed for Leeds at seventeen and spent several years travelling between training in Yorkshire and studying painting at the Slade School in London, a weekly commute between two irreconcilable lives that became the subject of his first novel, This Sporting Life.
He was equally successful as a playwright, taking the Evening Standard Award for The Contractor and New York Drama Critics Circle prizes in three different years, and the sheer breadth of a career that yielded fifteen plays and eleven novels has meant his fiction is now less read than it was. Saville is closely drawn from his own upbringing in Wakefield.