This book has the subtitle ‘stories of five
decades’ combining, as it does three previous collections, first published in
the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, with a couple of more recent stories.
The Desperadoes collection (published 1961) has
stories from the late 50’s and early 60’s with post-war austerity and emerging
youth culture ,set in the industrial north, providing the context for his tales
of everyday working-class men and women.
A Season With Eros (published 1971) and The
Glad Eye (published 1986) show how times have changed for these folk with many
materially better off and enjoying the freedoms (moral and material) on offer –
nice houses, foreign holidays, semi-detached relationships – but against a
contrasting background of 3 million unemployed.
For me Barstow is a master of the short
story. Usually a punchy opening line hooks the reader in and then the tale
unfolds in uncomplicated prose, exploring whatever facet of human nature he has
chosen to expose. The dialogue is convincing (any dialect remains readable) and
the denouements are satisfying.
The location, characters and situations are
reminiscent of Barstow’s classic A Kind of Loving trilogy (one of my favourite reads
that similarly had volumes published over an extended period and so reflected
social change, as well as Vic Brown’s personal development) and there can be no
finer recommendation from me.
A word of caution to the Kindle edition; the
page numbering is hard to credit as the 251 pages cannot possibly contain the
41 stories that originally made up three separate books. I timed my reading of
the last “12” pages at 40 minutes, so either the printed version is in a miniscule
font or the real length is more like 500 pages – which makes the purchase (it
was a 99p deal of the day) even better value.
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