Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #847268 in Books
• Published on: 1983-09-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 284 pages

Customer Reviews

A classic of post-war English novel
In this novel of 1950 William Cooper introduces the character of Joe Lunn, whose subsequent career is followed in his later novels "Scenes from Metropolitan Life" and "Scenes from Married Life".
In "Scenes from Provincial Life", which is set between the Munich Conference of 1938 and the summer of 1939, Joe Lunn is a young schoolmaster in a provincial town who enjoys making love to his girlfriend without committing himself to marrying her. The novel describes, in a dry style, Lunn's whole provincial world: his affair, his plans to leave England for the US, along with some friends; his friendships, his work at school, etc.

I decided to read this book because I had found it praised in a history of the British novel, where it was considered a sort of cornerstone of post-war English fiction and said to have inspired a whole generation of writers. "Scenes from Provincial Life" is, indeed, a far cry from "the genteel world of pre-War experimentalism", being rather "a brusque return to a fictional world of personal morality, class consciousness, and sexual honesty".
But I am no expert of literature, let alone of literature of the Fifties, and I must confess that I did not understand why this book is (or was) so important.

What I can say, however, is that this novel, although obviously haunted by the general atmosphere of the period and of the looming war, is intensively and credibly private.
I will try to explain what I mean by "private". Sometimes, when I think of the late thirties - or of other times in history that similarly came just before tragic events - I tend to forget the individual perspectives, as if every single life were already suspended, waiting (almost) to be swallowed up by history. Well, even during that summer of 1939 (that for so many people would be their last summer!), people where obviously still planning to make a holiday in France, or to get married, or to buy a new car. This also happens in the book, which in this sense is a powerful insight into ordinary and "provincial" people, with real lives, whose private and personal dimension is always in the foreground.

Unlike other books of this period (for example, Philip Larkin's A Girl in Winter, 1947), I will not say that this is a book that you cannot miss. But it has a beauty of its own, and I feel I can recommend it even to those who, like me, are "common readers".

The arrival of the average man
In the 1950s a new tone and a new type of central character began to appear in British fiction. Kingsley Amis's "Lucky Jim" is probably the paradigm, but "Scenes from Provincial Life", published whilst Amis was still wrestling with the drafts of what was to become "Lucky Jim", gets there first in many ways.
In contrast to, for example, the work of the Bloomsbury group, in which people who work tend to appear only as a problem or a comic turn, the heroes of these 1950s novels have jobs. Their jobs, moreover, tend to take up quite a bit of time in the novel since the characters work for a living not out of a desire to make themselves one with the people, as writers of Auden's generation might do, but because economically they have no choice. Their work is unglamorous and often bores them; their ultimate end is usually to earn more whilst doing less, and they have no shame in "skiving off" as much as possible. Again in contrast to the anguished hand-wringing of, say, E.M. Forster, over how one should live, these new men tend to have a bluntly utilitarian approach to life, centred on Lucky Jim's insight that "Nice things are nicer than nasty ones". Although educated, they tend to mistrust "high culture" and its purveyors: they prefer jazz to Mozart, beer to wine, and a trip to the pub to an evening singing madrigals. Give these men record collections and they could fall straight into a Nick Hornby novel.
For some upholders of high culture, this meant that the Philistines were at the gate, and there was much talk at the time of these new barbarians being the result of the 1944 Education Act extending, in effect, education to people not deserving of it. The authors concerned, of course, were not young enough to profit from this expansion of schooling and if any outside factor lies behind this new tone it may, rather, be the experience of military service in the war: here they would have encountered the services' long traditions of making life tolerable by skiving and never volunteering for anything, and also learned that one's superiors were quite capable of looking like idiots close up.
So to "Scenes from Provincial Life". Cooper's hero, Joe Lunn, fits this template well. He teaches at a grammar school in a midlands town (the town is never named, but anyone who knows Leicester will recognise it: the cat is out of the bag as soon as one of Joe's pupils says "Oo-yah bugger!"). His job and his colleagues bore him. He's in a sexual relationship with his girlfriend, but spends a lot of effort avoiding the commitment she wants from him: Muriel wants marriage, he likes things well enough as they are. The novel is set in 1939, but the great political issues of the day boil down for Joe to whether or not he should make a bolt for America before war breaks out. His saving grace is self-awareness, a clear-eyed refusal to glamorise his motivation, which goes hand in hand with an awareness of how the other characters are equally self-centred but simply in denial about their motives.
Thus far the similarities to "Lucky Jim". There are differences. Joe is more receptive to "culture" than Jim Dixon. He is matter-of-fact about his best friend being gay, and sleeping with Joe's pupils, something one cannot imagine from the aggressively blokey Amis. The humour in general is more feline than Amis's rumbustious clowning, almost camp in its tone. The ending, too, is less comedic: the characters are dispersed by war and by the consequences of their all wanting different things, and there is no fairy-tale ending of the sort Amis engineers for Jim Dixon.
These differences do give the novel a very different tone to "Lucky Jim", and indeed to "Hurry on Down" or the other 1950s Movement novels. It's still interesting in its own right, rather than simply as a literary landmark. Cooper apparently came to feel that Amis had stolen the idea for "Lucky Jim" from him, but there are reasons why the latter enjoyed more success at the time and subsequently; put simply, Amis is a lot funnier. Still, read this as announcing the arrival of a new, cooler tone to English fiction, and if you ever muse on how much simpler your life would be if you didn't have to spend large slabs of it working with idiots (if my bosses ever read this, I'd like to assure them that this is a purely hypothetical scenario) then salute Cooper as he puts your situation centre-stage.