Member Review

Meet Vic Brown. He's young (about twenty) and lives at home with his coal miner father, mother and teenaged brainbox younger brother in late 1950s Yorkshire. Vic works as a draughtsman and has eyes for Ingrid, a pretty young woman who also works in his office. But when Ingrid becomes pregnant, both her and Vic's lives are transformed forever.
A Kind of Loving was first published in 1960 and was quickly made into quite a famous film starring a young Alan Bates and other rising stars of the time such as Thora Hird and James Bolam. It is very much a book of its time and fits in neatly with other kitchen sink dramas of the Macmillan era such as the plays, Look Back In Anger by John Osborne, A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney and the novels and stories of Alan Sillitoe and others figures often broadly categorised as "angry young men."
Vic Brown's world thus now seems very old-fashioned. He routinely refers to women as "bints," seems sexually naive by 21st standards and does not seem to even have a phone in his house, let alone a mobile. His views on race and immigration are, however, remarkably liberal for a young working-class man of the time even if the language he uses to express them isn't.
Despite the passage of over sixty years, however, the book holds up pretty well. Vic Brown isn't always a very sympathetic or likeable narrator: I'm not sure he was ever supposed to be.. Nevertheless, through him, Barstow has left us with a valuable snapshot of the thoughts and attitudes of a Britain slowly edging its way forward from the time of "you've never had it so good" towards the age of the Beatles, the permissive society and the Ready, Steady, Go era of the 1960s.