Holiday
by Stanley Middleton
Summary
Edwin Fisher, a lecturer in his thirties, takes a week at the English seaside resort he was brought to as a boy. His marriage to Meg has ended, their baby son has died, and he has come to sit in a boarding house and think about it, which is precisely what he does.
Almost nothing else occurs. He walks on the front, drinks with the other guests, is politely rude to a landlady, watches a variety show on the pier, and is then ambushed by the arrival of his father in law, who has decided to broker a reconciliation and will not be discouraged. Meg, it emerges, is staying nearby.
The past comes in flashes rather than in sequence: a courtship, a bad marriage between two people who were probably never suited, and a death that neither of them can discuss.
Middleton writes plain, exact, undemonstrative English about provincial people, and he is very good at the specific misery of a family conversation in which nobody says anything true. There are no set pieces and no epiphany.
This is the quietest book to win the prize and it divides readers absolutely. Some find it a small masterpiece of English realism. Others find it thin. It is short, and worth trying if you like Barbara Pym or William Trevor.
Under two hundred and fifty pages and readable in a sitting. Approach it as a study of a man failing to say the one thing that matters, in a language that also refuses to say it, and the flatness stops being a fault and becomes the method.
Historical Context & Significance
Holiday shared the Booker Prize in 1974 with Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist, the first time the award had been split.
The deadlock was produced partly by a conflict of interest that would be impossible today. Judge Elizabeth Jane Howard was married to Kingsley Amis, whose Ending Up was shortlisted. The panel compromised on a tie.
The two winners went in opposite directions. Gordimer became a Nobel laureate. Stanley Middleton, who had taught English at a Nottingham grammar school for many years, kept publishing steadily until his death in 2009, reaching around forty five novels in total, and declined an OBE. In 2006 a newspaper submitted the opening chapters of Holiday to publishers and agents under a false name as an experiment. Almost all of them rejected it.