No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy by Mark Hodkinson

Author:Mark Hodkinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books

I wasn’t altogether sure about Barstow. He was a little fond of himself but his books sounded interesting. A few days later, I bought the one that had been most talked about between the jousting: A Kind of Loving. I was drawn in from the first paragraph where the protagonist, Vic Brown, twenty years old, is chatty and questioning, sure of himself and then shadowed by doubt. The obsessive nature of first love – on this occasion for Ingrid Rothwell, a typist who works at the same place as Vic – is swiftly laid out and leads the story. I knew the vernacular well. Men were ‘blokes’; girls were ‘bints’ or ‘birds’; a mother was an ‘Old Lady’ and something became ‘summat’.

The novel, Barstow’s debut, had been published in 1960 and, as I soon discovered, was of a genre dubbed ‘kitchen sink realism’ because it featured working (or unemployed) people in their natural environment – down the pub, in the backyard, on street corners and, of course, gathered in their kitchens, bickering or making up as the kettle boiled.

During the 1950s and 1960s the creative industries had noted the rise of intelligent, educated writers of working-class origin (drawn chiefly from grammar schools) and offered them patronage to reach the huge but largely untapped market they represented. These authors and playwrights who held a cracked mirror to life in post-war Britain had been given the catch-all classification of ‘angry young men’. They were drawn mainly from the north of England and the Midlands and saw the literary value of setting work in their home towns and featuring people similar to those with whom they’d grown up. They were eager and passionate for change, although the categorisation was somewhat of a misnomer. Most were in their thirties – not particularly young – when published, and depicting working-class life in an authentic way was enough for them to be viewed unilaterally as ‘angry’. Also, unlike, say, the Bloomsbury Set or the Beat Generation in the United States, it was an unconnected grouping, both politically and socially, most of whom did not know one another.

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