BOO KS
555
much the same: a region of Yorkshire has to
be
given a sort of
archetypal status, the price and quality of objects must be recorded
because the inhabitants of the Braine country are obsessed by their
own status. It is a device of Mr. Betjeman's for registering the
modem suburban scene. A young man looks at his Ingersoll, some–
one drives up in a Rover 90 (O.K., but not for the very top). In
Braine there are passages like this: "She took off her dressing-gown,
powaered herself with French Fern talcum, and lay down on the
narrow bed with the white iron frame. She took a Player's from
the white deal bedside table.... " Why, one wonders is the dressing–
gown colorless and without a maker's name? Together with this
love of the brand name goes a nostalgic admiration for the well–
made old Yorkshire things, but wanting good things, old and new,
is the main driving force of Braine's characters. His hero in this
second book finds the going hard; in childhood he had helped to
invent a whole mythology of irrational monstrous enemies called
the Vodi, whose motiveless malignity continues, in later life, to
frustrate him. He falls in love with failure and it almost makes him
die (the sanitarium scenes are very accurate) . The desire to
achieve one of the nurses sets him back on the road of life. There
is no reason why this shouldn't" do; but what made
Room at the
Top
memorable was the reality and the normal violence of the
love scenes; and the new book has nothing comparable. Braine is
going to be at work on the Braine country for a long time; he
thinks of himself as a Brontean mythmaker (and the Bronte coun–
try geographically overlaps his). He has the patience, certainly, to
make a map; the question is whether the vitality of
Room at the
Top
can be restored, the map brought to life.
Sillitoe's book is a collection of stories dominated by the title
piece, which is very fine . The Sillitoe country is Nottingham back
streets, and he is interested in rendering the tones of urban poverty
more darkly, and more accurately, than has lately been the custom.
The big story is a monologue by a boy at a reform school. His talent
for cross-country running is encouraged by the Governor, who
wants him to win a cup in a competition. The boy on his train–
ing run tells how he broke into shops and why, his morality a
neat inversion of the respectable kind; and on the race day he just
stops and avoids winning, in order to do the really honest thing
