Festival at Farbridge
by J. B. Priestley
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This book is set in a very specific period - just before and during the Festival of Britain in 1951. It concerns the efforts of three individuals - a young girl, a young man who's just returned to the UK from the East (and is partly Asian himself) and an older man who's something of a "chancer" - to persuade the people of Farbridge, a provincial town, that they want to be a part of the Festival. Needless to say they meet opposition from some people, but by hook and by crook the Farbridge Festival eventually takes place. There's a good deal of satire on local political factions (of all colours - the portrayal of the local Communist party is particularly cutting, compared with the not unsympathetic picture of the town's Tory MP) and there show more are some entertaining set pieces, including a description of a play whose author is obviously based on Christopher Fry, whose fame was at its height during these years. Well worth reading if you have any interest in the novels of the mid 20th century. show less
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233+ Works 6,938 Members
English novelist, playwright, and critic J. B. Priestley was born in Bradford in Yorkshire, the setting for many of his stories, and was educated at Cambridge University. Although he first established a reputation with critical writings such as The English Comic Characters (1925), The English Novel (1927), and English Humor (1928), it is for his show more novels and plays that he is best known. Priestley was, like John Galsworthy and Somerset Maugham, a novelist only partially committed to his playwriting. Yet he became the dominant literary figure in the London West End during the 1930s, as he attempted to make realistically rendered domestic conversation the vehicle for a mature study of personality and emotion. Philosophical theories about time, Socialist dogmatism (often erupting into sermons), and a taste for dramatic expressionism may be said to have finally deflected him from his goal. Priestley's experimental bent nevertheless yielded, among his more than 25 plays, a number of striking theatrical situations---the soliloquies of Ever since Paradise, the reviewed life in Johnson over Jordan (1939), the replay of an ill-fated conversational turn in Dangerous Corner (his most successful play, 1934), and the supernatural visitation in An Inspector Calls (his acknowledged masterpiece, 1946). (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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