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Image of a society
239 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1956
About the author
Roy Fuller
84 books2 followersPoems (1939) was Roy Broadbent Fuller's first book of poetry. He also began to write fiction in the 1950s. As a poet he became identified, on stylistic grounds, with The Movement. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University 1968-1973.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 30, 2017
Another of my 'lost or forgotten authors' second-hand purchases, and well worth it. My heart did sink a bit when I read the blurb describing it as written by a man who worked in a Building Society and that a Building Society would be an integral part of the novel - I have no understanding of the way money is made to work and words such as 'debenture' and 'mortgage' make me feel as if I have entered a sepia-coloured world of stifling dullness. Indeed, one of the novelist's achievements is the creation of just such a sepia world in what I have always supposed to be the post-war, constrained society of the 1950s. And his choice of the northern fictional town of Saddleford in West Yorkshire / Manchester - the real life Saddleworth springs to mind? - is suitable with its pollution encrusted town- and land-scapes, its sulphurous smoke and overcast weather. And domestically I found it spot on with doileys under the plate of biscuits, the silver-hooped biscuit barrels, the brass and bamboo coffee tables and cocoa. This is the world of the club and the pub, The Grill and the flicks, of cigaettes and pipes, and the evening paper, and is all quietly desperate, an image of a world getting on with life not with a bang, but with a bit of a whimper.
However, this was a top notch read because the focus is much more on the human figures at the heart of both the novel and, one guesses, the novelist's humanising view of the commercial world. We open with Ramsden, the grandly named House Manager (i.e. cleaner-in-chief) in his basement office and we close with Gerson, the virtuous, dull, reliable God-fearing 'figures man', who, like the man in the parable, seats himself low down at the table only to find himself rewarded for his unassuming humility by an appreciative and financial savvy Board of Directors influenced by the yellow-faced but still astute Sir Harold. Thus the novel's title, 'Image of a Society', embraces working, middle and upper classes as well as the constant jockeying for recognition and self-advancement characteristic of both commercial and social life. It's a neatly made conceit, I think, and possibly the choice of a Building Society as a central setting is a metaphor for a society trying to rebuild itself after WW2, the writer good-naturedly and with careful critical irony outlining not only the reality of England in 1956 but also suggesting that building a happy society is not an easy thing. Despite Gerson's dullness, it is to him that Fuller attributes the best of motives in the novel. I don't think the following passage is ironic, but I stand to be corrected:
'Arnold Gerson was aware that by some his conscientiousness and thirst for knowledge was thought to be only a design for finding favour with his superiors. But those of that mind did not understand the principles of loyalty and industry. Man existed to serve his fellow-men, and all who worked for the society had the great privilege and opportunity of serving through the society. Here was an organization which helped to preserve the community, brought stability and thrift into the lives of many to whom those qualities might otherwise have remained alien, and for itself made only such profit as was consonant with preserving its existence infinitely.'
Nevertheless, Gerson is not without his faults. He is not without vanity or ambition, and is, in common parlance, a bit of a toady, but he has the relative virtue of not pushing himself forward in the way that Stuart Blackledge does. This latter is a man who, with his hearty pipe-smoking and pally friendliness with Cecil Hepworth (who turns out the be a developer with a skill at just avoiding financial liability for projects from which he otherwise benefits), exudes the kind of not-entirely-unjustifiable confidence, bonhomie and competence that he believes will gain him the promotion he has set his sights and heart on. A venal man, whose wife, Rose, who agonises over her affair with Philip Witt, and who, while she is guiltily away being lovingly naughty in a London hotel, does not imagine that her husband is in Manchester cruising for talent. Yet when Blackledge meets his Waterloo, Fuller is not triumphalist in his character's demise, and he deals with the Mortgage Manager's desperate sense of failure in a sensitive though matter-of-fact way as a sort of semi-detached tragedy.
Philip Witt is the Head Office Solicitor, mid-thirties (?), unmarried, of delicate health and still living at home with his parents. He goes out in a sexually limited, desultory, fatalistic sort of way with Christine Eastwood, a 29-year-old teacher who also still lives at home. He aspires to be a writer, but during the novel we scarcely ever see him getting down to it and although he has formerly published one quite successful novel about wartime, that's it. Fuller is very good at expressing the kind of unhappy secretiveness that was required to engineer a lovers' weekend away in the mid-50s, though I don't think there is any equivocation about the sincerity of Philip and Rose's feelings for each other. Nevertheless, by the end of the novel, their future - even though Philip has broken, painfully, with Christine - is not assured. The recovery of Rose's, cat, Ludo, from a severe bout of feline gastro-enteritis, may, however, signal that Fuller regards their future with optimism.
I found Philip the least easy of the characters to get a hold of. The best I can manage to decipher from Fuller's commentary on Philip's thought processes is that Philip is a man racked with self-doubt; he is frustrated into permanent writer's block by the necessity of his day job and living at home with a mother and father who are emotionally dependent on him, which together cripple his sense of creative freedom; and he feels trapped by his relationship with Christine which has gone on long enough for everyone to regard them as engaged, though he himself shows no inclination to be married. In his depiction of Philip, I think Fuller's style lets him down: I found it meandering and abstracted. Perhaps that's the point: Philip is hemmed in by bewildering meaninglessness. But it doesn't make such passages easy to read.
There's much to be enjoyed in this deft depiction of a particular world at a particular time, even if the atmosphere smacks dispiritingly of Whistler's muted studies and Atkinson Grimshaw's night scenes. Against this social backdrop, human beings try stoically to make sense of and the best of what they've got. For some it may work out; for others it doesn't; for others still, it has worked out as well as it's likely to and they are hoping to hang on to it. And the author who portrays them is not, I think, unkindly.
However, this was a top notch read because the focus is much more on the human figures at the heart of both the novel and, one guesses, the novelist's humanising view of the commercial world. We open with Ramsden, the grandly named House Manager (i.e. cleaner-in-chief) in his basement office and we close with Gerson, the virtuous, dull, reliable God-fearing 'figures man', who, like the man in the parable, seats himself low down at the table only to find himself rewarded for his unassuming humility by an appreciative and financial savvy Board of Directors influenced by the yellow-faced but still astute Sir Harold. Thus the novel's title, 'Image of a Society', embraces working, middle and upper classes as well as the constant jockeying for recognition and self-advancement characteristic of both commercial and social life. It's a neatly made conceit, I think, and possibly the choice of a Building Society as a central setting is a metaphor for a society trying to rebuild itself after WW2, the writer good-naturedly and with careful critical irony outlining not only the reality of England in 1956 but also suggesting that building a happy society is not an easy thing. Despite Gerson's dullness, it is to him that Fuller attributes the best of motives in the novel. I don't think the following passage is ironic, but I stand to be corrected:
'Arnold Gerson was aware that by some his conscientiousness and thirst for knowledge was thought to be only a design for finding favour with his superiors. But those of that mind did not understand the principles of loyalty and industry. Man existed to serve his fellow-men, and all who worked for the society had the great privilege and opportunity of serving through the society. Here was an organization which helped to preserve the community, brought stability and thrift into the lives of many to whom those qualities might otherwise have remained alien, and for itself made only such profit as was consonant with preserving its existence infinitely.'
Nevertheless, Gerson is not without his faults. He is not without vanity or ambition, and is, in common parlance, a bit of a toady, but he has the relative virtue of not pushing himself forward in the way that Stuart Blackledge does. This latter is a man who, with his hearty pipe-smoking and pally friendliness with Cecil Hepworth (who turns out the be a developer with a skill at just avoiding financial liability for projects from which he otherwise benefits), exudes the kind of not-entirely-unjustifiable confidence, bonhomie and competence that he believes will gain him the promotion he has set his sights and heart on. A venal man, whose wife, Rose, who agonises over her affair with Philip Witt, and who, while she is guiltily away being lovingly naughty in a London hotel, does not imagine that her husband is in Manchester cruising for talent. Yet when Blackledge meets his Waterloo, Fuller is not triumphalist in his character's demise, and he deals with the Mortgage Manager's desperate sense of failure in a sensitive though matter-of-fact way as a sort of semi-detached tragedy.
Philip Witt is the Head Office Solicitor, mid-thirties (?), unmarried, of delicate health and still living at home with his parents. He goes out in a sexually limited, desultory, fatalistic sort of way with Christine Eastwood, a 29-year-old teacher who also still lives at home. He aspires to be a writer, but during the novel we scarcely ever see him getting down to it and although he has formerly published one quite successful novel about wartime, that's it. Fuller is very good at expressing the kind of unhappy secretiveness that was required to engineer a lovers' weekend away in the mid-50s, though I don't think there is any equivocation about the sincerity of Philip and Rose's feelings for each other. Nevertheless, by the end of the novel, their future - even though Philip has broken, painfully, with Christine - is not assured. The recovery of Rose's, cat, Ludo, from a severe bout of feline gastro-enteritis, may, however, signal that Fuller regards their future with optimism.
I found Philip the least easy of the characters to get a hold of. The best I can manage to decipher from Fuller's commentary on Philip's thought processes is that Philip is a man racked with self-doubt; he is frustrated into permanent writer's block by the necessity of his day job and living at home with a mother and father who are emotionally dependent on him, which together cripple his sense of creative freedom; and he feels trapped by his relationship with Christine which has gone on long enough for everyone to regard them as engaged, though he himself shows no inclination to be married. In his depiction of Philip, I think Fuller's style lets him down: I found it meandering and abstracted. Perhaps that's the point: Philip is hemmed in by bewildering meaninglessness. But it doesn't make such passages easy to read.
There's much to be enjoyed in this deft depiction of a particular world at a particular time, even if the atmosphere smacks dispiritingly of Whistler's muted studies and Atkinson Grimshaw's night scenes. Against this social backdrop, human beings try stoically to make sense of and the best of what they've got. For some it may work out; for others it doesn't; for others still, it has worked out as well as it's likely to and they are hoping to hang on to it. And the author who portrays them is not, I think, unkindly.
September 30, 2014
First published in 1956, this novel is still relevant and still a cracker. Beautifully written, it deals with some rather anal people in the upper echelon of a Northern England building society.
Fuller does wonderful work with this unpromising material. A man in line for promotion agonizes over the parking spot; the society's lawyer is in thrall to dominating parents; there is much SHY WRANGLING over things that shouldn't matter; and there is an affaire.
The novel is so beautifully crafted I didn't want to put it down. The characters who "strut and fret their hour upon the stage" are real. The book wouldn't be everyone's cup of cocoa but it was certainly mine.
Fuller does wonderful work with this unpromising material. A man in line for promotion agonizes over the parking spot; the society's lawyer is in thrall to dominating parents; there is much SHY WRANGLING over things that shouldn't matter; and there is an affaire.
The novel is so beautifully crafted I didn't want to put it down. The characters who "strut and fret their hour upon the stage" are real. The book wouldn't be everyone's cup of cocoa but it was certainly mine.
Read
September 30, 2024As much as I enjoyed Fuller's poetry, I wasn't really impressed by the fiction. The burgeoning romance worked OK, especially as we got towards the end of it, but all the financial dealings of the building society I found very boring. However, in order for the romance to work out as it did all the building society stuff had to happen too, even if it was maximally dull.
March 31, 2019
Life in a 1950s provincial building society – fiction doesn’t get much more exciting than this.
But actually Image of a Society (a nicely ambiguous title) is a pleasure to read, as one might hope from a writer who is better known as a poet than as a novelist. What we are offered is not just the office politics of the Saddleford Building Society – the prudent and successful product of a smoke-blackened Yorkshire town (the word “grime” appears frequently throughout) – but also the fretful, hollow lives of its ostensibly prudent and successful managers.
Roy Fuller is good on atmosphere – especially the suffocating home life of its unassertive central character, Philip Witt, whose “ambiguous love for his parents and for [his girlfriend], and his profession, went on, like a symphonic climax too prolonged, in a tension that had become boring and ungraspable.”
I have to say I found the dispiriting Philip a bit dull – despite being modelled on Fuller himself, as a young solicitor with aspirations to become a writer. His set piece interactions and incidents – involving parents, girl friend, writer’s block, and indecisive affair – are modest whilst his chronic self-doubt is prolonged. It is sometimes a relief to get away from him and pursue the supporting characters – one of whom faces an agony of worry over the allocation of numbered parking spaces...
But actually Image of a Society (a nicely ambiguous title) is a pleasure to read, as one might hope from a writer who is better known as a poet than as a novelist. What we are offered is not just the office politics of the Saddleford Building Society – the prudent and successful product of a smoke-blackened Yorkshire town (the word “grime” appears frequently throughout) – but also the fretful, hollow lives of its ostensibly prudent and successful managers.
Roy Fuller is good on atmosphere – especially the suffocating home life of its unassertive central character, Philip Witt, whose “ambiguous love for his parents and for [his girlfriend], and his profession, went on, like a symphonic climax too prolonged, in a tension that had become boring and ungraspable.”
I have to say I found the dispiriting Philip a bit dull – despite being modelled on Fuller himself, as a young solicitor with aspirations to become a writer. His set piece interactions and incidents – involving parents, girl friend, writer’s block, and indecisive affair – are modest whilst his chronic self-doubt is prolonged. It is sometimes a relief to get away from him and pursue the supporting characters – one of whom faces an agony of worry over the allocation of numbered parking spaces...
October 10, 2022
I'd recommend Anthony Peter's review.
This is possibly my favourite book. Other candidates so you can see what it's up against: "A Tale of Two Cities" and Ishiguro's "The Unconsoled".
I love "Image of a Society" because it's realistic. It's set against a dull backdrop, but one I love (probably because I'm northern) and I can relate to the internal conflicts of the main characters. It's written with the utmost clarity (apart from one or two passages.) A financial deal goes badly wrong, but it's not spectacular or glamorous - because, generally, life isn't.
If you were to read and enjoy the first couple of pages, you would enjoy the whole book.
This is possibly my favourite book. Other candidates so you can see what it's up against: "A Tale of Two Cities" and Ishiguro's "The Unconsoled".
I love "Image of a Society" because it's realistic. It's set against a dull backdrop, but one I love (probably because I'm northern) and I can relate to the internal conflicts of the main characters. It's written with the utmost clarity (apart from one or two passages.) A financial deal goes badly wrong, but it's not spectacular or glamorous - because, generally, life isn't.
If you were to read and enjoy the first couple of pages, you would enjoy the whole book.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews