Robert Colls
Toil & Trouble
The Valley: A Hundred Years in the Life of a Family
By Richard Benson
Bloomsbury 521pp £25
The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910–2010
By Selina Todd
John Murray 464pp £25
Richard Benson was tempted to turn his family history into a novel but stuck with the facts instead. Good decision. This rare and finely tempered work serves up a devastating combination of memory and imagination. What Benson was actually told by family members about life in the Dearne Valley we will never know. But you sense the story’s authenticity right from the start, in the unlikely surroundings of a Spiritualist meeting in a dowdy hall in Shirebrook in 1907. Two women and four men stand behind chairs facing a vaguely expectant crowd. They are supposed to be making contact with the dead but Annie and Walter make contact with each other instead. Gertrude Winifred Parkin, their first child, arrives on 12 December 1909.
At the age of 19, Winnie, as she likes to be called, meets Harry Hollingworth at a dance. Like his father, and her father, and almost every other man at Goldthorpe Welfare Hall that evening, Harry is a coal miner. Benson writes freshly and originally about lives that did not always seem fresh or new, from the outside at least, and he takes us through the hall
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘I have to change’, Miles Davis once said. ‘It’s like a curse.’
@rwilliams1947 tells the story of how Davis made jazz cool.
Richard Williams - In Their Own Sweet Way
Richard Williams: In Their Own Sweet Way - 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lo...
literaryreview.co.uk
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson - review by Terry Eagleton via @Lit_Review
for the new(ish) April issue of @Lit_Review I commissioned a number of pieces, including Deborah Levy on Bowie, Rosa Lyster on creative non-fiction, @JonSavage1966 on Pulp, @mjohnharrison on Oyamada, @rwilliams1947 on Kind of Blue, @chris_power on HGarner