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Saville

3.32 of 5 stars 3.32 · rating details · 147 ratings · 15 reviews

Colin Saville grows up in a mining village in South Yorkshire, against the background of war, of an industrialised countryside, of town and coalmine and village.

Paperback, 0 pages

Published June 28th 1978 by Avon Books (first published 1976)

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Jul 10, 2012 John rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This novel epitomizes one of my favorite quotes:

"Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary." ― Boris Pasternak

Reading this book really is an extraordinary experience! I found much of it to be very comforting, very homey. I found other parts to be quite disturbing. This novel affected me in ways that I'm still trying to sort out. I suspect this is a story that I'll continue to think about, to try to c...more

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Mar 03, 2012 Courtney H. rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: bookers

Well, I have fallen behind on reviewing and on reading, so I figured I might try to do a little catching up. Since I just reviewed Sons and Lovers, might as well start with Saville, one of its successors. Saville falls into a fairly well-trod category of British literature: boy grows up in poor mining town, tries to escape, alternatively aided and held back by imperfect parents. Similarly, the main character is conflicted about his town: he feels his mining roots strongly, but at the same time y...more Well, I have fallen behind on reviewing and on reading, so I figured I might try to do a little catching up. Since I just reviewed Sons and Lovers, might as well start with Saville, one of its successors. Saville falls into a fairly well-trod category of British literature: boy grows up in poor mining town, tries to escape, alternatively aided and held back by imperfect parents. Similarly, the main character is conflicted about his town: he feels his mining roots strongly, but at the same time yearns for a life free of it but can never quite shed his own skin. But while the territory is familiar, Saville does not hide the ball. The novel’s purpose is clear from the beginning and instead Storey focuses on telling a good story about characters you can engage with. Storey also is unapologetic about his main character, Colin. He is selfish; he is stubborn; he is good enough to scramble out of the mining town but not quite good enough to be great; and that makes for an interesting character and an interesting story. It is not, ultimately a story about greatness breaking free – one expects greatness to break free, or the comfort of a tragedy if outside forces prevent it. With mediocrity – granted, one accompanied by some talent and intelligence, but something more middle-of-the road, the likelihood of success is smaller just as the character’s desperation for success grows. Here is the interesting tension of the book, I think, and not a small part of why it was a good book to read. Moreover, Storey knows how to tell a story (no pun intended). It is a page turner; the words and pages flow easily, quickly, and there is an actual plot. It moves slowly in that it covers his life in a detailed way, but the book isn’t bogged down with description (while also successfully making the mining town live as the extra character that the mining town always seems to be) – it is about what characters do, and it is told simply and directly. It is a successful model for a simple story concept, that plays out effectively on the page.

In the end, it isn't my favorite Booker, but it was a solid entry.(less)

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Jun 24, 2010 piratemoon rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

There was a very strange feel to this book. It felt very removed from that which it was narrating, the sense of alienation which the main character, Colin, feels by the end, being a part of the reader-experience throughout.

That isn't to say I didn't enjoy it. I did, actually. I rather got into reading it. It gave a view into a world that I didn't know, but that became increasingly familiar throughout. It was a world that I could imagine my Grandparents being aware of, something they would have...more There was a very strange feel to this book. It felt very removed from that which it was narrating, the sense of alienation which the main character, Colin, feels by the end, being a part of the reader-experience throughout.

That isn't to say I didn't enjoy it. I did, actually. I rather got into reading it. It gave a view into a world that I didn't know, but that became increasingly familiar throughout. It was a world that I could imagine my Grandparents being aware of, something they would have known and recognised. This environment and the changes which it went through were evoked in a great deal of clarity.

But I am afraid that the same cannot be said of the characters. They seemed to remain static. Colin only seems to age by virtue of getting older and the world around him changing. Perhaps this is something to do with that alienation cited before – because I was not immersed in the interior of the character from the start, I found it difficult to find any evidence of character development. I found myself in the same position of puzzlement that Colin did – like him, I did not understand his character the way others seemed to.

'“Ever since you were a baby you've kept things to yourself.”
She waited, her hands poised in the bowl, her head bowed to the sink.
“I never thought I'd been secretive,” he said.
“Not secretive.” She tried to smile, her face shadowed in the corner of the room. “I mean the things you feel you can never express. People can take advantage of that at times.”
“Oh, I've never been aware of it.”'

He doesn't understand himself – and neither do I. There didn't, to be honest, seem all that much to understand. Neither do many of the other characters seem to develop much. By the end of the book they have become caricatures. Their characteristics just become more and more pronounced. But Colin does not. He remains just this 'he', his only real feature a slight puzzlement. It is stated that he changes, that he gets angry and goes off the rails, but none of this comes across in the characters at all.

Towards the end of the book there is a strange episode which seems to suggest that Colin is some kind of reincarnation of his deceased elder brother Andrew, or at least an aspect of him. This is a very odd suggestion in a book which has been based so much around the harshness of real life, but perhaps an appropriate thought for someone as (apparently) poetic as Colin. I can't see him as a poet, to be honest. He lacks the emotion.(less)

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Feb 25, 2011 Leslie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011, 20th-century-fiction

Brought all sorts of other books to my mind: Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence, of course, Room at the Top by John Braine, even How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn. Early/mid-century bildungsroman among the industrial working class and the tensions created by aspirations to escape one's environment while also feeling connected to it.

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Jul 31, 2012 Katy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: booker-prize-winners

This is a book that is going to stay with me for awhile. I enjoyed the minutiae of Saville, but I also found the tone to be just so well handled. It is a tone of bleakness, frank existence, and of struggle.

Struggle to get out of a place, struggle to make others see a place as you see it, struggle to seek approval, struggle to give approval, struggle to please. This was what really struck me most, was the parent-child dynamics being played out. Michael Reagan and his violin, Batty going to jail (...more This is a book that is going to stay with me for awhile. I enjoyed the minutiae of Saville, but I also found the tone to be just so well handled. It is a tone of bleakness, frank existence, and of struggle.

Struggle to get out of a place, struggle to make others see a place as you see it, struggle to seek approval, struggle to give approval, struggle to please. This was what really struck me most, was the parent-child dynamics being played out. Michael Reagan and his violin, Batty going to jail (just as was expected of him), Stafford doing as he pleases because he comes from money, and then we have our Saville. Colin's parents put him through school to give him a way out of the pit, to give him hope, and more opportunity than they had. Plenty more opportunity than his grandparents had. And in the end, as Saville tries to find his own identity and pressure his brothers to do the same, he is convinced that rather than doing him a favor, his parents have forced him in to "prostitution." His sense of duty to the family, supplying wages and staying at home, has turned to bitter resentment that he claims he has no way out of.

So, when he finally does leave, is it permanent? I don't see Saville's departure lasting long...

As for the other characters in the novel, I was especially intrigued by Michael Reagan and his behaviors, especially in to adulthood. While Colin's parents supported him, MR's father ridiculed his violin playing and berated his mother for supporting him, leaving Michael with no real sentiment or attachment to them as they fell ill.

Oh Saville's women... It seemed that he was closer to his mother than his father, and he has this righteous sense of propriety when it comes to his brother's behavior with women, but then Saville turns around and runs off with the easiest girl on the block... and then finds himself in bed with a married woman. All in all, I found Colin to be just... spineless when it came to relationships.

Throughout the novel, there is a never-ending sense of people entering and leaving Saville's life. They may return often, they may not, but he is always able to shrug them off and walk away... By detaching Saville from the pit, have his parents prevented him from having any real ties to anything?(less)

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Sep 19, 2008 Philip rated it 5 of 5 stars

A reflection on Saville by David Storey

Saville won the Booker Prize in 1976. In such a vast novel it is inevitable that the pace will occasionally quicken and slacken, but a book like this can be read over weeks, almost dipped into as the passing phases of Colin’s life unfold. David Story was born in Wakefield, and so was I. It could be argued that his most famous and perhaps still most successful work is “This Sporting Life”, a portrait of a Rugby League player who achieves local fame and then...more A reflection on Saville by David Storey

Saville won the Booker Prize in 1976. In such a vast novel it is inevitable that the pace will occasionally quicken and slacken, but a book like this can be read over weeks, almost dipped into as the passing phases of Colin’s life unfold. David Story was born in Wakefield, and so was I. It could be argued that his most famous and perhaps still most successful work is “This Sporting Life”, a portrait of a Rugby League player who achieves local fame and then notoriety as his life and career blossom and then fall apart. It was filmed in the early 1960s, with Richard Harris playing the starring role. Along with about 28000 others, I was in Wakefield Trinity’s Belle Vue ground soon after midday to make sure that I got a standing place by the railings next to the pitch to see Trinity play Wigan in a cup-tie. I was only ten and needed to be early because, had I been further back amongst the crowd, I would have seen nothing. Wakefield beat Wigan 5-4, with Fred Smith scoring the only try of the game at my end. They went on to win at Wembley that year, beating Huddersfield in the game where Neil Fox used a drop goal strategy not seen before or since.

But before that cup-tie against Wigan, the packed Trinity ground became a film set. We were all unpaid extras as Richard Harris and members of the Trinity second team filmed some actions Sequences for “This Sporting Life”. I show no disrespect for Richard Harris by recalling that the sequence required a whole string of takes, necessitated by the fact that the star kept dropping the ball! I have seen the film several times, but I have not yet managed to spot my short-trousered legs behind the sticks at the Belle Vue end. They are there, somewhere.

I digress at length from my intended review because Colin, the central character of Saville, could easily have been me, or perhaps my older brother. Like Colin we were brought up in a small Yorkshire mining village. Also like Colin we went to a grammar school and experienced similar tensions and contradictions as a result of social class differences. And again like Colin we both became, as a result of that education, something previous generations of our permanent-feeling community had never aspired to, perhaps never knew existed. Unlike Colin, we did not aspire to become writers, except of course for me, who eventually tried to become one! It was the education that changed everything and this aspect of Saville is beautifully portrayed, right down to the visit to the old Kingswell’s shop in Wakefield to buy the ludicrously expensive school uniform, a source of pride for the miner’s family, but also a pointer indicating how lives will inevitably diverge.

Saville also deals with how social mores were changing in the new second half of the twentieth century. Colin’s parents simply could not relate to how his life was developing, perhaps finding hardest to stomach the individuality that he developed and was determined to express. It was a quality you could not pursue when, as poor people, your lives were always inter-dependent. The communal nature of their poverty made this a desire they could not comprehend and occasionally his pursuit of his own ends was seen by them – perhaps quite rightly – as errant selfishness. Of course, we now live in an age where the individual is the norm, the indivisible unit of society and, perhaps, where an idea of community is mere nostalgia.

Above all else David Storey’s Saville evokes a time and a place. It also evokes a language, a dialect that preserves the use of thee, thy, thou and thine and, although occasionally laboured, the book’s specialised vocabulary and syntax create the sound of a Yorkshire twang.

Saville has no vast themes, no overtly historical settings against which the characters enact their lives. Rather it concentrates on a social and economic setting which was quite peculiar to these mining communities in Yorkshire. But this is the book’s real strength. What we have is a social document, as powerful and yet as specific as some of its nineteenth century equivalents. Now, after the closure of the pits, though the villages remain, these communities have disappeared to be replaced by settings that perhaps offer less chance of social mobility or self-respect than in Saville’s time. This provides and irony that my own novel set in these same places might bring into focus. But in Saville’s time, the idea that the pits would close never entered anyone’s head, a fact which makes Colin’s transformation through the book remarkable, credible and yet ultimately sad, since we now see it as effectively driven by necessity, not choice. (less)

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May 30, 2010 Peter Jansen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Although somewhat bleak this book stayed with me and really gripped me. It really puts you in the shoes of the main character.

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Aug 10, 2010 Kim rated it 2 of 5 stars

I thought the last part of this book was really excellent but it just took far too long getting there.

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May 26, 2009 Sherry added it

I liked this book. Well written. Kept me engaged. Made me think, reflect, and wonder. Can't ask for more from a book, so I'm glad I rescued it from my husband's hometown library's giveaway shelf.

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Dec 15, 2008 Jen marked it as to-read

1976 Booker Prize

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Jan 07, 2011 Kathy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: booker-prize-winners, read-in-2010

This book is just a little bit depressing.

The evocation of time, place and character is strong, but the alienation of the eponymous hero is reflected in a narrative that only really describes the outside of everything. The story is disjointed and there seem to be huge blank areas of the character's life about which we are told nothing.

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Apr 21, 2013 مى سلامه rated it 3 of 5 stars

mmm at first time i think it was like Seville city in Spain :)hh I'm Just Joking but The story is disjointed and there seem to be huge blank areas of the character's life.
I enjoy

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Jan 28, 2012 Deanne rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: booker-winners

Found Saville a very difficult character to warm to. Just found him very insipid, wanted him to have a back bone and to achieve something.

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Apr 03, 2009 Gina rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: awards-read, read-in-2009

1976 Booker

Story of Colin Saville, from birth until he finally decides to take control of his life.

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May 22, 2013 Brenda Alba marked it as to-read

May 21, 2013 Roberto Gomez rated it 3 of 5 stars

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May 21, 2013 Jason Brunson rated it 1 of 5 stars

May 19, 2013 Catherine marked it as to-read

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May 19, 2013 Ayumh rated it 1 of 5 stars

May 18, 2013 Brigette marked it as to-read

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May 17, 2013 James Ervin rated it 4 of 5 stars

May 17, 2013 Jasper Koning marked it as to-read

May 15, 2013 Julie Fozzard rated it 3 of 5 stars

May 14, 2013 Libby Hays marked it as to-read

May 13, 2013 Ince marked it as to-read

May 12, 2013 Alicja Mielczarek marked it as to-read

May 11, 2013 Laura rated it 1 of 5 stars

May 11, 2013 Jaibir rated it 4 of 5 stars

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