First published 1965. Vintage, paperback, 2005, pp 275, c.70,000 words.
This novel was a great success when first published, making Margaret Forster’s name, and was made into a successful film.
The story is contemporary, and covers the transition that British society was going through from the class-based order of the old world to the youth culture that emerged in the 1960s. On the one hand we have Ted and Doris who are valet and cook to the very wealthy Leamingtons who live in Mayfair and, in contrast, their daughter, Georgina, who has a flat in Battersea that she shares with another girl. Georgina had been sponsored through a privileged education by the Leamingtons, but is trying to carve an independent life.
It is presumably intended to be a realist novel, a type of book that emerged in the sixties, and characters are presented warts and all. The rich are presuming and the poor are forever moaning and no one seems to be able to stick with anything. The result was that I didn’t like any of the characters. Each has some major irritating flaws: Ted thinks he has a cushy job but is a servant who lives for his master; Doris is a moaner but takes no action; James Leamington assumes the world is there to serve his needs and is a pervert; Georgina is a manic depressive and door mat; Meredith, her flat mate, is unredeemingly awful and, because she is beautiful and sexually active, gets away with whatever she wants; Jos, Meredith’s boyfriend doesn’t know what he wants and gives in too easily. I didn’t find the situations realistic and I had a hard time believing that real people would act as the characters here do. Fortunately, the book is relatively short.
The writing is very fluent and flows along well, except that it is let down by the publishers. On the evidence of this, the senior management at Random House / Vintage should be sacked. Clearly no one read the printer’s proof. I stumbled over numerous typos; on my casual reading I spotted five in the first ten pages.
© William John Graham, June 2022