Word: coline
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...playwright: character and plot emerge mainly through dialogue, backed up by simple, controlled description. Blatant authorial intrusions are rare. Like his Victorian predecessors, Storey remains outside his characters, looking in; he avoids interior monologues, allo ing the feelings of his characters to surface in their words and actions. Colin is the focal point of the novel--Mr. and Mrs. Saville are always referred to as "his father" and "his mother" even when the antecedent is unspecified--but Storey refuses to lose himself in a single point of view, preferring the role of a restrained omniscient narrator...
...Colin's story begins before Colin's birth--in the mysterious wanderings of his older brother Andrew. Between Andrew and his mother there exists a bond religious in intensity: he is "both a trophy and a burden, she the successful recipient and suffering host." Her suffering reaches its apex when it turns out that Andrew's persistent excursions from home have an otherworldly goal; after his death of pneumonia, the longing for escape which was his by nature is projected onto Colin by his ravaged parents with a fervor which is again religious...
...SAVILLES' RELIGION is, in fact, upward mobility, and it is this which is to be their gift to Colin. To evade the mines, the eternal sameness and the dirt of pit life--for this, his parents' goal, Colin must struggle to harmonize the different requirements of village and school. The task is almost impossible. Returning home by bus while his more prosperous schoolmates take the train, Colin encounters an increasing demand for sacrifice and his parents' barely concealed scorn for the life they have foisted...
Love is no kinder to Colin. Keeping company with the feminist Margaret--who believes she can balance her womanhood and her career ambitions--Colin finds himself incapable of performing a similar balancing act. As the relationship deepens, he begins to see the poverty and dreariness of his origins through her eyes--clearly enough to understand why she leaves him for his glib, middle-class friend Stafford. But that understanding serves only to deepen his anger and his isolation...
...Storey's characters move. The landscape Storey describes is not only social, but literary: beside the stolidity of a Lawrentian mining village, he sets the formal rigidity of a Dickensian public school, with its masters almost comic in their severity. Through this landscape flits the mystical figure of Stafford, Colin's foil, who, like Dickens' Steerforth, sloughs off the spoils of his prosperity and talent with the same ease with which they accrue...