Melvyn Bragg: Crossing the Lines

Reviewed by JOHN GARDNER

At the core of Melvyn Bragg's latest offering in his series of novels on British postwar life is one of the most well-trodden themes in English contemporary literature - the progress of a working-class boy whose state education takes him away from his origins. As usual, the journey includes his sexual awakening, the broadening of his intellectual and social horizons and the conflict between his roots and his aspirations.

What sets Bragg's work apart is its acute sense of place. His characters are grounded not only in their class, but in their landscape: dour, bleakly beautiful Cumbria. In the first two books, The Soldier's Return and A Son of War, Ellen Richardson's attachment to her home is so strong it is a rival, ultimately successful, to her husband for her love.

Here, too, the physical nature of his home, both in the rural landscape and the streets of Wigton, has an equally powerful hold on Ellen's son, Joe, inextricably entwined with his feelings for his family and his first love, Rachel.

The Richardsons are unmistakable products of the north. Repression is the normal state of affairs. There are joys, pub singalongs and days out with the dogs, but there is always the knowledge that happiness has a price. Relaxation and comfort are temporary, for other people from another class and another place.

Joe is ruled by fear and guilt, that state which used to be considered more or less compulsory for the adolescent, but in his case develops to near-obsessive northern proportions garnished with religious fervour.

Bragg's prose style is matched to his material, plain to the point of leaden, although he seems to be loosening the reins a little more in this volume than in its predecessors. Equally plain is Bragg's insistence on making sure his readers don't miss the point.

Readers who were adolescent in the late 1950s will find Bragg's recall of the moral climate painfully accurate, but as a chronicle of its period the book is far less successful. The inclusion of the issues and cultural furniture of the day - from the jazzers' disdain for rock'n'roll to the British angst over Suez - seems formulaic and mechanical, relevant perhaps, but with little emotional charge even for those who, like this reviewer, experienced them.

The strength of the saga is private lives, not public life. The appeal of the books, and they are worth reading, is in the characters, from the original cast and the later additions. You'll find Ellen and Sam Richardson, with their modesty of ambition and their moral strength, the volatile Speed, the fascinating Lizzie and the tinker Diddler, a man in harmony with his life. All, in fact, rather more interesting than the routine - if poignant - love-life of young Joe.

John Gardner is an Auckland journalist.

*****

Head: Trilogy treat

canvas and Hodder Moa Beckett have four sets of Bragg's trilogy to give away: A Soldier's Return, A Son of War and Crossing the Lines. Our copies of A Son of War are not only hardcover, but are signed by the author. To be in the draw, write your name and address on the back of an envelope and send it to canvas, Bragg giveaway, PO Box 3290, Auckland, to reach us by August 8.

The winners of Annamarie Jagose's Slow Water (VUP) are: C. Bala, Rotorua; Gail Morgan, Coromandel; S Treneary, Pukekohe; Terry Bourk, Tauranga; Ken Lewis, Hamilton.

Sceptre, $34.99