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Flight Into Camden
This moving story is recounted by Margaret, the daughter of a Yorshire miner, who falls in love with a married teacher and goes to live with him in a room in Camden Town, London. Many critics have observed and almost lawrentian fidelity in the descriptions of their love-making and the intricacies of their emotional responses to one another. But in the end family ties prove too strong for an ambiguous relationship which begins to disclose a chasm of emptiness and bitterness.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1961
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About the author
David Storey
85 books30 followersDavid Storey was an English playwright, screenwriter, award-winning novelist and a former professional rugby league player. Storey was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire in 1933, and studied at the Slade School of Art.
His first two novels were both published in 1960, a few months apart: This Sporting Life, which won the Macmillan Fiction Award and was adapted for an award-winning 1963 film, and Flight Into Camden, which won the Somerset Maugham Award. His next novel, Radcliffe (1963) met with widespread critical acclaim in both England and the United States, and during the 1960s and 70s, Storey became widely known for his plays, several of which achieved great success.
He returned to fiction in 1972 with Pasmore, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award and was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Saville (1976) won the Booker Prize and has been hailed by at least one critic as the best of all the Booker winners. His last novel was Thin-Ice Skater (2004).
David Storey lived in London. He was married and had four children.
His first two novels were both published in 1960, a few months apart: This Sporting Life, which won the Macmillan Fiction Award and was adapted for an award-winning 1963 film, and Flight Into Camden, which won the Somerset Maugham Award. His next novel, Radcliffe (1963) met with widespread critical acclaim in both England and the United States, and during the 1960s and 70s, Storey became widely known for his plays, several of which achieved great success.
He returned to fiction in 1972 with Pasmore, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award and was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Saville (1976) won the Booker Prize and has been hailed by at least one critic as the best of all the Booker winners. His last novel was Thin-Ice Skater (2004).
David Storey lived in London. He was married and had four children.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
June 18, 2018
One of those books that I would have loved to quit, but instead I suffered through till the end.
It is hard to pinpoint what makes this such a poor read. It has definitely aged badly. While the themes the writer tries to convey here are quite universal, their setting and the characters just never really connect. They would be believable in a medieval fantasy setting, or a novel set in the 19th century, but somehow not in this one. Maybe we are still too close to these times?
The language is simply bad. I never felt really comfortable with the style it is written in. The characters also fall flat, and their dialogue is abysmal at times.
Nothing good in this one. Maybe it works as an example how to not write a book.
It is hard to pinpoint what makes this such a poor read. It has definitely aged badly. While the themes the writer tries to convey here are quite universal, their setting and the characters just never really connect. They would be believable in a medieval fantasy setting, or a novel set in the 19th century, but somehow not in this one. Maybe we are still too close to these times?
The language is simply bad. I never felt really comfortable with the style it is written in. The characters also fall flat, and their dialogue is abysmal at times.
Nothing good in this one. Maybe it works as an example how to not write a book.
May 10, 2018
Terminally dull story about the 'love' affair ( and I say that cautiously) between two mind numbingly boring people who run off to live in London because they're having an 'affair' ( I say that tentatively, there's no passion there). This was no doubt shocking in the 1960's (an era which now seems like light years away ) but has much less impact in 'modern' times. The reader has no concern for any of the characters, as they're presented like cardboard cutouts.
I think the author overstretched himself by writing from a woman's perspective to be honest because it's just not believable.
The narrative is stultifying and oppressive, like watching a bad 1960's film, along the lines of :
'Shall I leave?'
'If you like' ( gets the tea tray) (cups rattle)
'Do you want me to?' (turns to stare into bleak northern sunset)
'If you wish'( pours the tea)
'Ok'
'Goodbye'
'Goodbye' ( fades to sound of tramcars and factory whistles)
That's about it, really. The reader just ends up as uninspired as the book.
I think the author overstretched himself by writing from a woman's perspective to be honest because it's just not believable.
The narrative is stultifying and oppressive, like watching a bad 1960's film, along the lines of :
'Shall I leave?'
'If you like' ( gets the tea tray) (cups rattle)
'Do you want me to?' (turns to stare into bleak northern sunset)
'If you wish'( pours the tea)
'Ok'
'Goodbye'
'Goodbye' ( fades to sound of tramcars and factory whistles)
That's about it, really. The reader just ends up as uninspired as the book.
May 31, 2016
This book shows its age - it feels really dated.
There were some interesting bits - as one review noted, there is a Lawrentian feel of the various relationships and there are good descriptions of industrial grime.
Where I felt it go wrong was the lack of any sort of empathy between the characters - given the narrator is female and Storey's attempt does not really ring true. The woodenness of the relationships made me wonder why there was any draw of attraction. The story's development followed the same sort of apparent aimlessness - were we really like that at the end of the 50s? - with little understanding of sentiments: a sort of drifting into the relationship that felt completely unconvincing.
The ending followed the same lack of motivation or drive. It all just peters out.
So overall I found this quite a disappointing read. Perhaps a thing of its time (definitely a bit of the angry young man in it!), but time has not, in my mind, been kind to it.
There were some interesting bits - as one review noted, there is a Lawrentian feel of the various relationships and there are good descriptions of industrial grime.
Where I felt it go wrong was the lack of any sort of empathy between the characters - given the narrator is female and Storey's attempt does not really ring true. The woodenness of the relationships made me wonder why there was any draw of attraction. The story's development followed the same sort of apparent aimlessness - were we really like that at the end of the 50s? - with little understanding of sentiments: a sort of drifting into the relationship that felt completely unconvincing.
The ending followed the same lack of motivation or drive. It all just peters out.
So overall I found this quite a disappointing read. Perhaps a thing of its time (definitely a bit of the angry young man in it!), but time has not, in my mind, been kind to it.
February 5, 2020
I agree with the other one star reviews - horribly dated, and a mistake to write it from a woman's point of view, I think. We're supposed to believe Margaret has missed out by being a girl, in spite of her education, but she seems to have no interests - she doesn't read, get involved with politics or amateur dramatics or a choir, take an interest in art or sport, or have any aspirations, apart from not wanting to be like her mother. It's not at all clear what she and Howarth see in each other. I was around at the time when this is set, and whereas 'A Kind of Loving' rings true for me, this doesn't convince. It wasn't that easy to become a university lecturer even then, yet Michael seems unintellectual - it's a puzzle how he got the job. And art lecturers, FE lecturers, polytechnic lecturers, university lecturers etc did not walk into one another's institutions and mix freely with one another. I don't believe Michael would have taken his sister to a university do, I don't know what he objected to about Howarth's specialism, or why he didn't tell Margaret Howarth was married right away. I don't know why Margaret refused to go to his wedding, and, given the suffocating attitudes described in the book, it seems highly unlikely she would invite a married man round to have sex with her at her parents' house while they were away. Even at the time, this book must have been wanting. I don't understand how it won prizes.
July 25, 2021
I hated everyone in this book
March 5, 2024
Dislocation dance: poor Margaret, trapped between her suffocating, conventional family and the “useless man”, her vacillating lover Howarth. David Storey I would have been inclined to place in the second rank of that generation of highly talented working class male writers - Alan Sillitoe, John Braine, John Osborne et al - but this is as good as them; filled with the ennui and nervous energy of reckless fellas but also the impacts these have on the people around them.
The USP of Flight Into Camden, in which a working class girl is spirited away from her northern home by a lecherous schoolmaster, and holed up in an HMO in NW1, a place she finds “filthier than anything I had seen at home” - is that it’s a first person narrative from the woman protagonist. The “disintegration and decay…parasitic” she sees is grimly prophetic of a relationship conducted on secondhand furniture in front of a rented radio, as if they’d borrowed everything from someone else, including themselves.
Storey’s experiment doesn’t always work - determination to explore all aspects of their affair, highly daring in grey 1960 Britain - would probably now get him a Literary Review Bad Sex Award nom - for what male author would these days end a passage on passion with “I felt no climax: his satiation had been enough.” Risky as a potential strapline…
But it’s more than some trying sex scenes, thankfully. The family, pedantic, burdened by working class hegemony and shame, with an era-defining pass-agg mother who weaponises housework and her ill-health and a brother full of tragic small town machismo, are more sympathetically portrayed than they deserve. In the end it’s Howarth, the obsessive, unreliable lover who emerges as the monster, unable to sustain his dream or behave with any integrity when reality doesn’t precisely match his expectation. Caliban on a teacher’s pay grade.
A period piece, but what a period it was.
The USP of Flight Into Camden, in which a working class girl is spirited away from her northern home by a lecherous schoolmaster, and holed up in an HMO in NW1, a place she finds “filthier than anything I had seen at home” - is that it’s a first person narrative from the woman protagonist. The “disintegration and decay…parasitic” she sees is grimly prophetic of a relationship conducted on secondhand furniture in front of a rented radio, as if they’d borrowed everything from someone else, including themselves.
Storey’s experiment doesn’t always work - determination to explore all aspects of their affair, highly daring in grey 1960 Britain - would probably now get him a Literary Review Bad Sex Award nom - for what male author would these days end a passage on passion with “I felt no climax: his satiation had been enough.” Risky as a potential strapline…
But it’s more than some trying sex scenes, thankfully. The family, pedantic, burdened by working class hegemony and shame, with an era-defining pass-agg mother who weaponises housework and her ill-health and a brother full of tragic small town machismo, are more sympathetically portrayed than they deserve. In the end it’s Howarth, the obsessive, unreliable lover who emerges as the monster, unable to sustain his dream or behave with any integrity when reality doesn’t precisely match his expectation. Caliban on a teacher’s pay grade.
A period piece, but what a period it was.
April 20, 2024
I have caught up with some authors I read 40 or 50 years ago - this was 1961 after This Sporting Life which was made into a great film with Richard Harris. This love story within a shocked family is redolent of the social mores of the early 60s.
December 1, 2024
Another great read and whilst his novels are of a different era, the subject matter and detail translate to our times. Tender, moving and sad. Published 1961.
August 28, 2021
Storey won the 1963 Somerset Maughan Prize (for novelists under 30), and despite its dour grim northern face, it's got more energy than the other two I'd previously read (Saville and Pasmore). I enjoyed reading it in its original 1960s orange Penguin paperback, imagining being on one of the London-bound steam trains Storey describes.
The main surprise was that Storey writes from the female protagonist's viewpoint. Margaret is doubly trapped by her gender and class in her unlocated mining community (somewhere Yorkshire or County Durham). She seeks excitement and escape in the married person of Howarth, whose self-centredness is made slightly more bearable than Pasmore's as we see him third-person, and tinted just slightly more rosy through Margaret's eyes. Again Brits of a certain age will find it hard to escape the wailing credits of Coronation Street. The snipy over-the-wall comments and domestic dramas (with a tutting mother and besooted and brooding father) come straight off Tony Warren's soap, which was born almost contemporaneously (late 1960).
If you are going to read one of the prize-winning Storey novels, I would make it this one (rather than Pasmore or Saville). I am interested in This Sporting Life too, however, and would like to read it alongside Gordon Williams's 'They Used to Play on Grass'. Both authors majored in gritty working-class novels, but have been praised for football novels that suggest their enthusiasm - and potentially optimism - lay elsewhere.
The main surprise was that Storey writes from the female protagonist's viewpoint. Margaret is doubly trapped by her gender and class in her unlocated mining community (somewhere Yorkshire or County Durham). She seeks excitement and escape in the married person of Howarth, whose self-centredness is made slightly more bearable than Pasmore's as we see him third-person, and tinted just slightly more rosy through Margaret's eyes. Again Brits of a certain age will find it hard to escape the wailing credits of Coronation Street. The snipy over-the-wall comments and domestic dramas (with a tutting mother and besooted and brooding father) come straight off Tony Warren's soap, which was born almost contemporaneously (late 1960).
If you are going to read one of the prize-winning Storey novels, I would make it this one (rather than Pasmore or Saville). I am interested in This Sporting Life too, however, and would like to read it alongside Gordon Williams's 'They Used to Play on Grass'. Both authors majored in gritty working-class novels, but have been praised for football novels that suggest their enthusiasm - and potentially optimism - lay elsewhere.
March 21, 2016
“Flight into Camden” was first published in 1960. It is set initially in a grimy mining area on the outskirts of Manchester, a setting Story knew well because he was the son of a miner and first in his family to go to university. The main narrator is Margaret, daughter of a working miner. She and her two brothers were allowed to complete their schooling and the two brothers Michael and Alec have continued on to university, and have careers when the book starts as a university teacher and a chemist. Margaret has only gone as far as secretarial college and works as a secretary. I say “allowed’ because for working class parents of the 50s allowing children to continue their education after the legal `leaving age’ of fifteen meant a delay in their contributing to the family’s finances by working at whatever job they could get.
Michael takes Margaret with him to a literary discussion group and there she meets Gordon Howarth, known always as Howarth, a veteran in his thirties who teaches Industrial Design at the art college. What Michael, Margaret and Howarth all share is the idea that their education should enable them to break away from their working class background and become self-actualizing independent adults. Michael still lives at home to save money, but spends his time in Manchester with his university friends. Margaret tags along when she’s invited to try and connect to his life. Howarth socializes at the university as much as he can though he’s made to feel inferior for only teaching at the art college.
In the first part of the book Storey draws a detailed picture of a young people in the industrial north who can’t work out how to negotiate the differences between their parent’s lot in life and the potential that education has opened up to them. Michael derides his brother Alec’s focus on his wife and child telling Margaret, “A man should be a man, not a father.” Margaret rejects the idea of motherhood influenced by Michael’s attitude, telling her mother “Being a mother, to me, it all seems hopeless and useless.” Her pursuit of Howarth is not deterred by finding out he is a husband and father, the idea that he can leave that all behind and start afresh does not seem unreasonable to her.
The title is more evocative than is perhaps obvious. The attraction of London to young people living in the industrial north at the time of the book, and later when I was growing up in the same area, was that it seemed to offer boundless opportunity and an anonymity which would enable you to leave your class origins behind. Margaret and Howarth flee their homes and families and they end up in Camden because there they can find somewhere affordable to live. Camden is part of Greater London, but it’s still a tube or tram ride to the center of London where all the new and endless excitement and opportunity they dreamt of supposedly is to be found. Camden is now fairly gentrified and trendy, but my guess is that Storey chose it because back then it was entirely nondescript. It may not be the grimy North, but it’s not really London either. Arriving in Camden did not provide you with change, you still had to make it happen.
The core of the book, and what makes it so interesting, is how the two of them struggle to figure out what really matters to them, how to build a relationship of equals and how to justify it all to the families torn apart and bruised by their rejection of them and their values. Some blurbs describe the book as a romance, but I don’t find it romantic. It is however a fascinating take on the times, and the changes taking place in society, and it has relevance for young people starting out in the working world today.
The ending felt unsatisfactory to me, but maybe I am more optimistic than Storey was then. Even so I think many of the problems and issues Margaret and Howarth struggle to work through resonate today though, fortunately, most young people have more examples that can show them the way forward.
Michael takes Margaret with him to a literary discussion group and there she meets Gordon Howarth, known always as Howarth, a veteran in his thirties who teaches Industrial Design at the art college. What Michael, Margaret and Howarth all share is the idea that their education should enable them to break away from their working class background and become self-actualizing independent adults. Michael still lives at home to save money, but spends his time in Manchester with his university friends. Margaret tags along when she’s invited to try and connect to his life. Howarth socializes at the university as much as he can though he’s made to feel inferior for only teaching at the art college.
In the first part of the book Storey draws a detailed picture of a young people in the industrial north who can’t work out how to negotiate the differences between their parent’s lot in life and the potential that education has opened up to them. Michael derides his brother Alec’s focus on his wife and child telling Margaret, “A man should be a man, not a father.” Margaret rejects the idea of motherhood influenced by Michael’s attitude, telling her mother “Being a mother, to me, it all seems hopeless and useless.” Her pursuit of Howarth is not deterred by finding out he is a husband and father, the idea that he can leave that all behind and start afresh does not seem unreasonable to her.
The title is more evocative than is perhaps obvious. The attraction of London to young people living in the industrial north at the time of the book, and later when I was growing up in the same area, was that it seemed to offer boundless opportunity and an anonymity which would enable you to leave your class origins behind. Margaret and Howarth flee their homes and families and they end up in Camden because there they can find somewhere affordable to live. Camden is part of Greater London, but it’s still a tube or tram ride to the center of London where all the new and endless excitement and opportunity they dreamt of supposedly is to be found. Camden is now fairly gentrified and trendy, but my guess is that Storey chose it because back then it was entirely nondescript. It may not be the grimy North, but it’s not really London either. Arriving in Camden did not provide you with change, you still had to make it happen.
The core of the book, and what makes it so interesting, is how the two of them struggle to figure out what really matters to them, how to build a relationship of equals and how to justify it all to the families torn apart and bruised by their rejection of them and their values. Some blurbs describe the book as a romance, but I don’t find it romantic. It is however a fascinating take on the times, and the changes taking place in society, and it has relevance for young people starting out in the working world today.
The ending felt unsatisfactory to me, but maybe I am more optimistic than Storey was then. Even so I think many of the problems and issues Margaret and Howarth struggle to work through resonate today though, fortunately, most young people have more examples that can show them the way forward.
March 21, 2022
I loved this novel and the manner in which it was written. Though published in 1960, it has a timeless and universal quality about it because of the spare, minimalist writing, containing just enough details and letting the reader fully participate imaginatively with the story. I was fully immersed. Magnificent novel!
April 5, 2007
Its chilly starting at the funeral of the grandfather is not forgettable...
May 25, 2015
This book was extremely boring. I'm just glad I'm through. And I honestly don't know what else I could say about it. It was just boring.
July 25, 2015
Not bad, but preferred This Sporting Life.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews