J.B. Priestley: Festival at Farbridge (1953)

Edition: Heinemann, 1976
Review number: 829

I had never really thought about the 1951 Festival of Britain, and had assumed that it hardly amounted to much outside the South Bank. Virtually every town and village in the country did something to mark the event, however, and Priestley's comic novel is about the preparations for this in the small town of Farbridge.

The main difficulty for me in 2001 is to try to think of the 1951 festival as something different from the limp and banal celebrations of the Millennium which have just concluded. The situation is different; the Festival of Britain was in part a reprieve following the years of self-denial of the War and its aftermath, and in part a celebration of a hoped for future, not just a coincidence of the way that the calendar works. People's lives are different; we now live in a world where just about every household is centred around the then rare TV; education is considered far less important, and there is no longer any serious attempt to consider traditional high art as better than popular culture; the idea of a duty to others is much less important in politcal and commercial life.

All this means that Festival at Farbridge is interesting as a historical document. It is not really successful as a comic novel, particularly when compared to, say, Low Notes on a High Level, and could not have been thought particularly funny even in the early fifties.

J.B. Priestley: Daylight on Saturday (1943)

Edition: Heinemann
Review number: 25


This is a wartime propaganda novel, one of several written by Priestley. The others that I have read are more part of the thriller genre (about tracking down black marketeers and saboteurs, for example); this is a tale of ordinary people working in an armaments factory. It is clear that Priestley had decided where his patriotic duty lay, and he subordinated his art to the demands of the state. (If he had done this in Germany, of course, he would be attacked in the way that musicians such as Karajan and Strauss have been for their actions.)

I cannot help feeling, even though I have read few wartime propaganda novels, that Priestley would have produced ones among the best of the type, in much the same way that Laurence Olivier's Henry V would be expected to be among the best wartime propaganda films. There are parts that jar to a modern reader, particularly the way that the novel aims to persuade you that submission to the state is the best way; it is difficult to take that seriously in the late nineties.

An interesting feature of this novel is the narrative method, which is a variant of the multiple viewpoint; each chapter is written from the viewpoint of the person who was in the thoughts of the narrator of the previous chapter. It is not stream of consciousness; the style does not change between a chapter from the point of view of a middle aged university educated manager and one from that of a completely uneducated teenager machine operator, but it does create some interest.

The title, by the way, refers to the way the intensive work of the factory means that the workers only get to see daylight at weekends.