No Exit

By John Skow

SAVILLE by David Storey

Harper & Row; 506 pages; $10

Young Colin Saville does well in his "eleven-plus" exam, wins the scholarship to a prestigious grammar school and is considered to be university material. The time is just after World War II, and the English educational system has begun its shift from the old-boy network to the creation of a meritocracy. Like D.H. Lawrence's characters in Sons and Lovers, Colin's father is abraded by a life in the coal pits, and his mother by poverty and sickness, but there seems to be no limit to what the boy can achieve.

By his early 20s, however, Colin is becalmed and resentful, a teacher of dull-eyed children in a coal town, a survivor of a glum and perfunctory love affair. His only vivid feeling is rancid hatred for a placid younger brother who accepts a miner's life as normal.

Saville's emotional barrenness seems the result of the meanness of life in the village. He has no political instincts, and Novelist Storey (This Sporting Life and the play The Changing Room) is not pamphleteering. But his moving novel is what used to be called a social document; it demonstrates with harrowing examples that there is nothing ennobling about desperate and ill-paid labor.

Saville's own case is not so simple. His cage is unlocked, but it is clear that even if he chooses to venture outside he will drag the thing behind him forever. Circumstances have left him maimed; a radiant older brother died of pneumonia at the age of six in the year in which Saville was born, and his parents' grief made their reactions to the new baby guarded and distant. In the life of the mind, Saville lives a surrogate boyhood. For him, as for the surrounding villagers, maturity is impossible, and hope is a kind of toy that adults are ashamed to embrace.

Some of the Laurentian material in this new novel, notably Saville's unsatisfactory love affair, conveys a rare sense of place and emotion. Yet the impression remains strong that Storey, himself a miner's son, is unable to put enough distance between author and subject. His anger does not shake itself clear, and, like the hero, the novel's impressive strength never quite finds its direction. Skow

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