A Kind of Loving

Vic Brown, the son of a coal miner in Yorkshire, is slowly inching his way up from his working-class roots through a white-collar job as a draughtsman in a local engineering company. Vic begins to date Ingrid, a typist at the same engineering company, but when Ingrid falls pregnant on the only occasion that they go 'all the way', Vic finds himself trapped into marrying her and moving in with his controlling mother-in-law, a woman who takes an instant dislike to him.

Many readers will undoubtedly regard Vic as a sort of anti-hero but I think that this is being simplistic. Vic is generally sincere, decent and moralistic despite his obvious natural flaws – age, inexperience, lust. Vic makes mistakes; huge mistakes but they aren't show more malicious or premeditated. Here is a young man with his whole life ahead of him who manages to impregnate his girlfriend at their first tumble. This novel is of course, very much of its time, and Vic, has to do the right thing morally, despite knowing that he doesn’t love Ingrid.

Ultimately I felt frustrated, but couldn’t help but like him. Ingrid naturally inspired sympathy, but her refusal to stand up to her appalling mother also infuriated me. In contrast Ingrid's dad seemed such a thoroughly reasonable, sensitive and decent chap that it seems little surprise that he preferred to work away.

This is a novel that defines a whole generation in a very specific part of England, but the plot is also universal, a tale of unforeseen outcomes to certain actions. We realise that the Vic Browns and the Ingrid Rothwells of the world live all around us. The dialogue is real and gritty but despite not liking to set the norms of today against the standards of yesterday I found the constant referrals to women as 'bints', 'birds' and 'lasses' very uncomfortable reading and marked it down accordingly. show less

There is a positive way of reviewing this iconic sixties novel - which has been used as a set text in schools! - and a negative, the latter summed up in two words: Vic Brown. Seriously, I love the sixties, and I am not one for whitewashing history ('Oh, that's so sexist/racist/generally inappropriate to my delicate modern sensibilities'), but Stan Barstow's narrator is a vowel-displaced twit. Is the reader supposed to care about him, or - God forbid - sympathise with his plight? 'O woe is me, I got my girlfriend pregnant because I was only using her for sex, and now I have to marry her and my life is over!' He is just thoroughly obnoxious, calling women 'bints' and spouting ignorant views left, right and centre ('It gives you kind of a show more shock to see people like him [a homeless man] about these days and you can only think it's their fault'). I know Vic is only twenty and raised in a northern town in the 1950s, but I seriously wanted to smack him and his thick wavy hair and good suits into next week.

Which is also the positive aspect of this novel - unflinching honesty. Vic is not a hero, he's a git, and his unpleasantness is not fiction but reality. Poor trusting Ingrid and strong matriarchs like Mrs Brown and Mrs Rothwell are equally identifiable if unlikeable. And even Vic is 'not a bad lad', as his sister Chris insists - he respects his working class father while aiming to better himself, first with an engineering firm and then looking to take over the reins of a popular record shop, enjoys reading and hopes to find a loving relationship like his newly married sister. He just spouts a load of tripe and adopts a truly condescending attitude to women - when he finally gets what he wants from typist Ingrid, he treats her like trash. Ugh, men!

A Kind of Loving is actually the first of a trilogy, which might explain why we never find out about Mr Hassop's home life - but I really, really don't want to spend any more time with Vic. show less

Stan Barstow's A KIND OF LOVING (1960) has never been out of print, so that's 62 years now, and that's saying something. I ordered it after seeing a note in the TV listings last month about the 1962 film adaptation that starred Alan Bates. It sounded vaguely familiar, and I may have seen the movie at an army theater in northern Turkey all those years ago.

It's a great read. I thoroughly enjoyed it. A kind of "hardboiled," one-sided love story, narrated by 20 year-old Vic Brown, a mechanical draftsman with a small engineering firm in northern England in the 1950s, still living at home with his parents and a younger brother. (His older sister is newly married.) His dad is a miner, now a foreman, who has spent some forty years 'down the show more pit.' Vic falls for Ingrid, A pretty typist at his company, and they begin dating, and engage in casual sex over several months, always stopping short of "going all the way." Until finally they do, and guess what? Yup. And Vic has to marry her, even though he's long known he doesn't love her, because it was the fifties, and that's what you did when got a girl pregnant. And, since there wasn't much money, they moved into her parents' house. Ingrid's dad is a salesman, on the road most of the time, but he and Vic get along well. Her mother, on the other hand, is a whole different matter.

So it's this domestic drama, I guess you'd call it, all about the sexual mores of the times, and how the upwardly mobile lower middle class of England lived, how they struggled towards a better life. Vic is not the most admirable character in the way he uses Ingrid, who really does love him, but he has this dream of finding a girl who would have interests that would more closely match his own. I liked Vic's father, Arthur, and Ingrid's old man too. The mother-in-law, however, is a horror. But I'm not gonna tell you the whole story, okay? You'll just have to read it yourself.

Other readers - and critics too - have compared Vic Brown to John Updike's Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, but I don't see that. True, they both feel trapped, but Vic doesn't run. He stays, if unhappily. And Barstow's style is nothing like Updike's. But there are two sequels to the Vic Brown story, just as there were sequels (three) to Updike's RABBIT, RUN. Maybe I'll follow up. Because I really did love this book. There is indeed, "a kind of loving" in it. Very very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

This is one of the first books of modern literary fiction I read and it resonates strongly with me for that reason. I was concerned that I would discover on re-reading that it is actually not that good and its place in my affections would be diminished. This didn't happen because it is a good book, if not a great book. It paints a very convincing picture of northern working class society in the late fifties, not yet much affected by the changes starting to sweep across the western world. It is a society rigidly adhering to its own conventions, almost reveling in the toughness of life. And it also explores a young man struggling to articulate what he wants out of life, discovering the difference between love, infatuation and desire, show more having to live with the consequences of his actions and, just maybe, learning that loving is as much about the will as the emotions. 20 January 2017 show less

Oh it's a great life and we've only another thirty or forty years of it to come"
By sally tarbox on 31 December 2017
Format: Kindle Edition
First published in 1960, this is a tale of a distant era; Yorkshire miner's son Vic Brown is going places, with a job as a draughtsman, a supportive family and enough money to enjoy himself. Despite his laddish behaviour, he's an intelligent guy; and when he takes up with pretty but vacuous Ingrid, he soon realises her limitations.
But love and lust become confused, and soon Ingrid has some unwelcome news for her reluctant boyfriend...
While others have commented negatively about Vic as a person, I found I felt some sympathy for his plight, forced into marriage with someone he has nothing in common with. show more As a narrator, he really comes alive with his frank Yorkshire dialogue.
Last read when I was in my teens - now 40 years later, it's still a great read. show less

Written in 1960, A Kind Of Loving fits into the kitchen sink tradition, prominent in Britain at the time. Deeply rooted in its Yorkshire setting, it is very much concerned with the real people, with their everyday problems, hopes and experiences.

The protagonist, Victor, is a young, bright working class son-of-a-miner, just discovering females, and focussing on one young woman in particular.

The first half is essentially about Victor falling in love, and while the evocation of these feelings is very well done, this section does wear a little eventually. But it is necessary to set up the later sections where things get more complicated for Vic, and the book regained my interest.

It's a very good book - compellingly realistic, with show more real-world, relatable concerns and well depicted characters. Possibly the most distinctive thing about the book, though, is Barstow's wonderful use of the Yorkshire dialect. In his hands the language is so rich and expressive, it really elevates A Kind Of Loving from an interesting story to a compelling and immersive novel. show less

A young man, with inarticulate aspirations and desires, finds himself the 'victim' of biology and the social mores that require him to marry the first girl he has sex with, when she becomes pregnant. The novel shows how this happens, and draws out some of the consequences. This novel, set only fifty years ago, is an unimaginable distance from how we see northern working class life today. Strong social ties, full employment and robust family ties on one hand - the lack of choices for women and men, the lack of aspiration and the stultifying closeness of a society where everyone knows everyone's business on the other. Moralists of the present should remember that the certainties of the past were not so kind on all of those who had to live show more with them. A consistent first person narrative and a detailed depiction of life in a world that seems as remote as Jane Austen's show less