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Store
Store is a novel about managing a large London department store. It is somewhat old fashioned in a J.B. Priestley mould, dealing with the trials and tribulations of a retail establishment.
Manifold's London store is in trouble; profits are down and there is an imminent prospect of a hostile takeover. Sir Walter Manifold, still running the business he built up before the war, brings in John Conant from the Australian branches with the authority to do whatever is needed. After some investigation, he begins to realise that what is really necessary is for Sir Walter, now in his seventies and not what he was in his prime, to make way as general manager for someone younger. This is just about the only recommendation he cannot make directly, and this is where the internal politics become interesting. The machinations of Arnold Leverage, who runs a chain of rather more downmarket stores and is the main contender o take over Manifold's, muddy the waters further, and Conant's old love affairs, one with Sir Walter's daughter and one with the wife of another director, cause more complications.
Interest is sustained to the end, and the fate of the store hangs in the balance until the last few pages.
Manifold's London store is in trouble; profits are down and there is an imminent prospect of a hostile takeover. Sir Walter Manifold, still running the business he built up before the war, brings in John Conant from the Australian branches with the authority to do whatever is needed. After some investigation, he begins to realise that what is really necessary is for Sir Walter, now in his seventies and not what he was in his prime, to make way as general manager for someone younger. This is just about the only recommendation he cannot make directly, and this is where the internal politics become interesting. The machinations of Arnold Leverage, who runs a chain of rather more downmarket stores and is the main contender o take over Manifold's, muddy the waters further, and Conant's old love affairs, one with Sir Walter's daughter and one with the wife of another director, cause more complications.
Interest is sustained to the end, and the fate of the store hangs in the balance until the last few pages.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
13 people want to read
About the author
Alexander Fullerton
65 books30 followersAlexander Fullerton (1924–2008) was a British author of naval and other fiction. Born in 1924 in Suffolk and brought up in France, he was a cadet during the years 1938-1941 at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth from the age of thirteen. He went to sea serving first in the battleship Queen Elizabeth in the Mediterranean, and spent the rest of the war at sea - mostly under it, in submarines.
Fullerton's first novel SURFACE! sold over 500,000 copies. Then he worked on the 9-volume Nicholas Everard series that made his reputation.
Series:
* Nicholas Everard Saga
* Rosie Ewing
Source: Wikipedia
Fullerton's first novel SURFACE! sold over 500,000 copies. Then he worked on the 9-volume Nicholas Everard series that made his reputation.
Series:
* Nicholas Everard Saga
* Rosie Ewing
Source: Wikipedia
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September 15, 2025
To read Alexander Fullerton’s Store is to confront, head-on, the curious problem of the business novel in English literature: a form that has appeared at intervals, often promising illumination of the commercial structures that shape modern life, and yet rarely achieving the gravitas or durability of the domestic novel, the historical romance, or the moral allegory. Fullerton’s contribution is neither triumphant nor wholly negligible; it belongs to that middle ground where competence shades into mediocrity, where narrative momentum sustains the reader even as the lack of profundity leaves one faintly unsatisfied. The book’s premise is disarmingly ordinary: the internal politics of a large London department store, Manifold’s, threatened by decline and predatory takeover, with all the attendant boardroom intrigue, generational tension, and personal entanglement that such a scenario permits. On paper, it is an unpromising subject. Yet precisely in that ordinariness lies its fascination. Literature has rarely accorded retail the dignity of narrative; it has turned more readily to the factory, the mine, the mill, the bank, and left the department store to social historians. In attempting to dramatise the fate of such an institution, Fullerton joins a small, eccentric tradition that reaches back to Dickens’s Dombey and Son, passes through Trollope’s financiers and speculators, and finds twentieth-century expression in J.B. Priestley’s industrial and commercial sagas. That he fails to achieve their depth is obvious. That he tries at all is what makes the book curious, worth reviewing, even if ultimately unsatisfying.
The story itself is straightforward. Manifold’s, built before the war by Sir Walter Manifold, stands in decline. Profits have fallen, its grandeur has dulled, and its survival is threatened by the machinations of Arnold Leverage, who owns a chain of downmarket stores and embodies the vulgar vigour of modern capitalism. To arrest the decline, Sir Walter summons John Conant, an executive from the Australian branches, and gives him full authority to diagnose and resolve the problem. Conant quickly perceives that the problem is not managerial incompetence or market shifts but Sir Walter himself, whose age and sentimentality have become obstacles to renewal. Yet this is the one problem he cannot resolve directly, for to displace the founder would be to destroy him. Around this central tension swirl the familiar devices of melodrama: Conant’s past love affairs, one with Sir Walter’s daughter, another with the wife of a fellow director; the scheming of Leverage; the loyalties and resentments of the board. The fate of the store hangs in the balance until the final pages, with interest sustained but never elevated into profundity.
Why does the book fail to achieve the weight its premise invites? The answer lies in comparison. Dickens’s Dombey and Son, published a century earlier, is in some respects the archetypal business novel in English. At its centre is a firm, Dombey and Son, whose prosperity is both the pride and the obsession of Paul Dombey, the patriarch. Dickens imbues the business with allegorical weight: the fate of the firm mirrors the fate of the family, and the family drama is inseparable from the moral economy of capitalism itself. Dombey’s pride, his coldness, his refusal to value affection above profit, becomes not merely a personal flaw but a critique of mercantile values. Commerce becomes character; institution becomes allegory. Trollope, in novels like The Way We Live Now, performs a similar transmutation: speculation, fraud, and finance are not mere plot devices but mirrors of a society enthralled to money and deceit. And Priestley, in Angel Pavement, takes the struggles of a small London firm and renders them as a microcosm of interwar anxiety, a meditation on the precarity of class and the fragility of economic security.
Fullerton never achieves such transmutation. His Manifold’s is a store, competently described, but it never becomes more than itself. Its decline is presented as institutional, not moral; its fate matters only to its owners, not to society at large. The boardroom intrigue, though engaging in a narrow sense, lacks allegorical resonance. It is, in effect, melodrama rather than social novel: entertaining, but never illuminating. The store’s decline does not symbolise a broader decline of civic life, as it might have in Priestley’s hands; it is not transfigured into a moral allegory of pride and downfall, as it was in Dickens’s Dombey. It remains a problem of management, succession, and sentiment, dressed in narrative rather than critique.
The characters bear this out. Sir Walter Manifold is rendered sympathetically, a man whose virtues — loyalty, pride, tenacity — have curdled into flaws. His inability to let go of the reins is not villainous but human, a tragic instance of generational blindness. John Conant, the moderniser, is perceptive but compromised by personal entanglements; he sees clearly but cannot act decisively. Arnold Leverage, the rival, is vigorous but vulgar, the caricature of the predatory capitalist. Together they form a triangle of types — the old paternalist, the compromised reformer, the ruthless rival — but the triangle never becomes the geometry of a larger social allegory. They remain characters, not types of society. Dickens, by contrast, could take Paul Dombey and render him not just as a man but as the embodiment of mercantile pride; Priestley could take a small firm and make it stand for the fate of a class. Fullerton does not, or cannot, make Manifold’s stand for more than itself.
This is not to deny the novel its modest pleasures. The prose is competent, occasionally evocative. The pacing sustains interest; one reads on to see the fate of the store. Sir Walter’s portrayal has dignity; Conant’s predicament has plausibility; Leverage’s vulgarity has energy. The machinery of plot functions. But competence is not profundity, plausibility is not allegory, and energy is not illumination. To grant the novel two stars is to recognise this: that it entertains without enlightening, that it engages without elevating. It is not contemptible, but it is not enduring.
What, then, is its place? Perhaps it belongs to that curious category of novels that reveal, by their very limitations, the possibilities of a genre that never quite flourished. The business novel, in English letters, is a rare thing. Commerce permeates the novels of Dickens, Trollope, Gaskell, Priestley, but it is rarely the central subject. When it is — in Dombey and Son, in The Way We Live Now, in Angel Pavement — it becomes allegory, critique, moral theatre. Fullerton’s Store, by contrast, keeps commerce at the centre but never makes it allegorical. In so doing, it reveals the difficulty of the form. To write of institutions without reducing them to melodrama, to show commerce as both concrete and symbolic, to render profit margins as moral stakes — this is a task only the greatest novelists have achieved. Fullerton is not among them.
There is also a historical irony. Published in the twentieth century, Store appears in an era when the department store itself was a fading institution, overtaken by supermarkets, chains, and later malls. Its very subject matter was already on the cusp of obsolescence. The department store, once the cathedral of consumerism, the great civic building of modern retail, was beginning its decline. To make it the subject of a novel was therefore to risk irrelevance; to fail to make it allegorical was to guarantee it. Priestley, writing of interwar firms, caught them at their moment of social significance; Dickens, writing of mercantile houses, captured them at their Victorian apogee. Fullerton, writing of a declining store, fails to capture the poignancy of that decline.
And yet, there is something curiously touching about the attempt. To write of Manifold’s is to write, however imperfectly, of an institution that mattered to people, that shaped lives, that gave structure to communities. Even in failure, the novel gestures toward the reality that commerce is not only profit but culture, not only management but meaning. That it fails to sustain the gesture does not erase its value. It remains a curiosity, a relic of a genre that might have been.
In the end, Store reads like Priestley drained of allegory, Dickens without moral resonance, Trollope without irony. It is competent, intermittently absorbing, but never profound. To grant it two stars is not to dismiss it utterly but to locate it precisely: below the line of greatness, above the line of contempt. It is readable but not re-readable, engaging but not illuminating, a novel that sustains interest without deepening it. It reminds us of what the business novel can be, by showing us what happens when it is not.
And this is where the comparison with Priestley lands hardest. For Priestley, commerce was always allegory; the firm was never just a firm but a symbol of society itself. In Angel Pavement, a small London business becomes a stage for the anxieties of interwar life; in An Inspector Calls, a family’s complacency becomes an allegory of capitalist exploitation. Fullerton approaches, but never sustains, such transformation. His Manifold’s is threatened, but only as a store. Its fate does not resonate as the fate of society, only as the fate of a business. This is why the novel cannot endure.
Thus the review closes in honesty: Store is a novel that can be read, but not revered; enjoyed, but not admired. It is a curiosity, not a classic. Two stars, then, is not cruelty but proportion, the recognition that competence without profundity is not enough. And perhaps that is its final value: to remind us, through its limitations, of what literature can do when commerce is transfigured into allegory, when institutions become symbols, when profit margins reveal moral stakes. Fullerton does not achieve this. Priestley, Dickens, Trollope did. In the comparison lies the measure of the novel, and the measure is two stars.
But perhaps the novel’s truest meaning emerges only when viewed through the prism Adorno casts upon culture. For what Fullerton shows, in failing to make Manifold’s anything more than itself, is precisely the inability of art under late capitalism to grasp the totality of capitalism. The store remains surface, never depth; intrigue, never critique; object, never allegory. It is not that Fullerton failed as an individual novelist, but that the form itself faltered under the weight of the commodity. In refusing transcendence, the text mirrors the very society it depicts: a society unable to see beyond profit, unable to imagine institutions as anything but themselves, trapped in the flat ontology of the commodity form. If Dickens could still turn the firm into allegory, if Priestley could still make commerce stand for society, by Fullerton’s day the possibility was waning. The failure of Store is therefore instructive. It is not merely the failure of a novelist but the symptom of a culture where narrative itself is subordinated to the logic of the market, where allegory is foreclosed by administration, where the cathedral of consumerism can no longer be transfigured into literature but only into spectacle. This is why the novel lingers, despite its mediocrity: it is not just about the decline of a store, but about the decline of narrative itself under the pressure of late capitalism. And in that sense, Store may be more revealing than it knows — a failure that succeeds, unwittingly, in testifying to the failure of its age.
The story itself is straightforward. Manifold’s, built before the war by Sir Walter Manifold, stands in decline. Profits have fallen, its grandeur has dulled, and its survival is threatened by the machinations of Arnold Leverage, who owns a chain of downmarket stores and embodies the vulgar vigour of modern capitalism. To arrest the decline, Sir Walter summons John Conant, an executive from the Australian branches, and gives him full authority to diagnose and resolve the problem. Conant quickly perceives that the problem is not managerial incompetence or market shifts but Sir Walter himself, whose age and sentimentality have become obstacles to renewal. Yet this is the one problem he cannot resolve directly, for to displace the founder would be to destroy him. Around this central tension swirl the familiar devices of melodrama: Conant’s past love affairs, one with Sir Walter’s daughter, another with the wife of a fellow director; the scheming of Leverage; the loyalties and resentments of the board. The fate of the store hangs in the balance until the final pages, with interest sustained but never elevated into profundity.
Why does the book fail to achieve the weight its premise invites? The answer lies in comparison. Dickens’s Dombey and Son, published a century earlier, is in some respects the archetypal business novel in English. At its centre is a firm, Dombey and Son, whose prosperity is both the pride and the obsession of Paul Dombey, the patriarch. Dickens imbues the business with allegorical weight: the fate of the firm mirrors the fate of the family, and the family drama is inseparable from the moral economy of capitalism itself. Dombey’s pride, his coldness, his refusal to value affection above profit, becomes not merely a personal flaw but a critique of mercantile values. Commerce becomes character; institution becomes allegory. Trollope, in novels like The Way We Live Now, performs a similar transmutation: speculation, fraud, and finance are not mere plot devices but mirrors of a society enthralled to money and deceit. And Priestley, in Angel Pavement, takes the struggles of a small London firm and renders them as a microcosm of interwar anxiety, a meditation on the precarity of class and the fragility of economic security.
Fullerton never achieves such transmutation. His Manifold’s is a store, competently described, but it never becomes more than itself. Its decline is presented as institutional, not moral; its fate matters only to its owners, not to society at large. The boardroom intrigue, though engaging in a narrow sense, lacks allegorical resonance. It is, in effect, melodrama rather than social novel: entertaining, but never illuminating. The store’s decline does not symbolise a broader decline of civic life, as it might have in Priestley’s hands; it is not transfigured into a moral allegory of pride and downfall, as it was in Dickens’s Dombey. It remains a problem of management, succession, and sentiment, dressed in narrative rather than critique.
The characters bear this out. Sir Walter Manifold is rendered sympathetically, a man whose virtues — loyalty, pride, tenacity — have curdled into flaws. His inability to let go of the reins is not villainous but human, a tragic instance of generational blindness. John Conant, the moderniser, is perceptive but compromised by personal entanglements; he sees clearly but cannot act decisively. Arnold Leverage, the rival, is vigorous but vulgar, the caricature of the predatory capitalist. Together they form a triangle of types — the old paternalist, the compromised reformer, the ruthless rival — but the triangle never becomes the geometry of a larger social allegory. They remain characters, not types of society. Dickens, by contrast, could take Paul Dombey and render him not just as a man but as the embodiment of mercantile pride; Priestley could take a small firm and make it stand for the fate of a class. Fullerton does not, or cannot, make Manifold’s stand for more than itself.
This is not to deny the novel its modest pleasures. The prose is competent, occasionally evocative. The pacing sustains interest; one reads on to see the fate of the store. Sir Walter’s portrayal has dignity; Conant’s predicament has plausibility; Leverage’s vulgarity has energy. The machinery of plot functions. But competence is not profundity, plausibility is not allegory, and energy is not illumination. To grant the novel two stars is to recognise this: that it entertains without enlightening, that it engages without elevating. It is not contemptible, but it is not enduring.
What, then, is its place? Perhaps it belongs to that curious category of novels that reveal, by their very limitations, the possibilities of a genre that never quite flourished. The business novel, in English letters, is a rare thing. Commerce permeates the novels of Dickens, Trollope, Gaskell, Priestley, but it is rarely the central subject. When it is — in Dombey and Son, in The Way We Live Now, in Angel Pavement — it becomes allegory, critique, moral theatre. Fullerton’s Store, by contrast, keeps commerce at the centre but never makes it allegorical. In so doing, it reveals the difficulty of the form. To write of institutions without reducing them to melodrama, to show commerce as both concrete and symbolic, to render profit margins as moral stakes — this is a task only the greatest novelists have achieved. Fullerton is not among them.
There is also a historical irony. Published in the twentieth century, Store appears in an era when the department store itself was a fading institution, overtaken by supermarkets, chains, and later malls. Its very subject matter was already on the cusp of obsolescence. The department store, once the cathedral of consumerism, the great civic building of modern retail, was beginning its decline. To make it the subject of a novel was therefore to risk irrelevance; to fail to make it allegorical was to guarantee it. Priestley, writing of interwar firms, caught them at their moment of social significance; Dickens, writing of mercantile houses, captured them at their Victorian apogee. Fullerton, writing of a declining store, fails to capture the poignancy of that decline.
And yet, there is something curiously touching about the attempt. To write of Manifold’s is to write, however imperfectly, of an institution that mattered to people, that shaped lives, that gave structure to communities. Even in failure, the novel gestures toward the reality that commerce is not only profit but culture, not only management but meaning. That it fails to sustain the gesture does not erase its value. It remains a curiosity, a relic of a genre that might have been.
In the end, Store reads like Priestley drained of allegory, Dickens without moral resonance, Trollope without irony. It is competent, intermittently absorbing, but never profound. To grant it two stars is not to dismiss it utterly but to locate it precisely: below the line of greatness, above the line of contempt. It is readable but not re-readable, engaging but not illuminating, a novel that sustains interest without deepening it. It reminds us of what the business novel can be, by showing us what happens when it is not.
And this is where the comparison with Priestley lands hardest. For Priestley, commerce was always allegory; the firm was never just a firm but a symbol of society itself. In Angel Pavement, a small London business becomes a stage for the anxieties of interwar life; in An Inspector Calls, a family’s complacency becomes an allegory of capitalist exploitation. Fullerton approaches, but never sustains, such transformation. His Manifold’s is threatened, but only as a store. Its fate does not resonate as the fate of society, only as the fate of a business. This is why the novel cannot endure.
Thus the review closes in honesty: Store is a novel that can be read, but not revered; enjoyed, but not admired. It is a curiosity, not a classic. Two stars, then, is not cruelty but proportion, the recognition that competence without profundity is not enough. And perhaps that is its final value: to remind us, through its limitations, of what literature can do when commerce is transfigured into allegory, when institutions become symbols, when profit margins reveal moral stakes. Fullerton does not achieve this. Priestley, Dickens, Trollope did. In the comparison lies the measure of the novel, and the measure is two stars.
But perhaps the novel’s truest meaning emerges only when viewed through the prism Adorno casts upon culture. For what Fullerton shows, in failing to make Manifold’s anything more than itself, is precisely the inability of art under late capitalism to grasp the totality of capitalism. The store remains surface, never depth; intrigue, never critique; object, never allegory. It is not that Fullerton failed as an individual novelist, but that the form itself faltered under the weight of the commodity. In refusing transcendence, the text mirrors the very society it depicts: a society unable to see beyond profit, unable to imagine institutions as anything but themselves, trapped in the flat ontology of the commodity form. If Dickens could still turn the firm into allegory, if Priestley could still make commerce stand for society, by Fullerton’s day the possibility was waning. The failure of Store is therefore instructive. It is not merely the failure of a novelist but the symptom of a culture where narrative itself is subordinated to the logic of the market, where allegory is foreclosed by administration, where the cathedral of consumerism can no longer be transfigured into literature but only into spectacle. This is why the novel lingers, despite its mediocrity: it is not just about the decline of a store, but about the decline of narrative itself under the pressure of late capitalism. And in that sense, Store may be more revealing than it knows — a failure that succeeds, unwittingly, in testifying to the failure of its age.
March 12, 2012
Originally published on my blog here in August 1998.
Store is a novel about managing a large London department store. It is not perhaps the kind of book I would normally read, not being particularly interested in the trials and tribulations of retail, but I enjoyed Fullerton's novel, which is somewhat old fashioned in a J.B. Priestley mould.
Manifold's London store is in trouble; profits are down and there is an imminent prospect of a hostile takeover. Sir Walter Manifold, still running the business he built up before the war, brings in John Conant from the Australian branches with the authority to do whatever is needed. After some investigation, he begins to realise that what is really necessary is for Sir Walter, now in his seventies and not what he was in his prime, to make way as general manager for someone younger. This is just about the only recommendation he cannot make directly, and this is where the internal politics become interesting. The machinations of Arnold Leverage, who runs a chain of rather more downmarket stores and is the main contender o take over Manifold's, muddy the waters further, and Conant's old love affairs, one with Sir Walter's daughter and one with the wife of another director, cause more complications.
Interest is sustained to the end, and the fate of the store hangs in the balance until the last few pages.
Store is a novel about managing a large London department store. It is not perhaps the kind of book I would normally read, not being particularly interested in the trials and tribulations of retail, but I enjoyed Fullerton's novel, which is somewhat old fashioned in a J.B. Priestley mould.
Manifold's London store is in trouble; profits are down and there is an imminent prospect of a hostile takeover. Sir Walter Manifold, still running the business he built up before the war, brings in John Conant from the Australian branches with the authority to do whatever is needed. After some investigation, he begins to realise that what is really necessary is for Sir Walter, now in his seventies and not what he was in his prime, to make way as general manager for someone younger. This is just about the only recommendation he cannot make directly, and this is where the internal politics become interesting. The machinations of Arnold Leverage, who runs a chain of rather more downmarket stores and is the main contender o take over Manifold's, muddy the waters further, and Conant's old love affairs, one with Sir Walter's daughter and one with the wife of another director, cause more complications.
Interest is sustained to the end, and the fate of the store hangs in the balance until the last few pages.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews