A Temporary Life

After seven plays and four novels, all widely acclaimed, [Storey] now presents a first-person account of certain incidents in the temporary life of Colin Freestone, a one-time professional boxer turned artist. On the occasion of his wife's breakdown, Freestone returns with her to her home town in the north and takes a job in the local art school. Here we meet a whole gallery of startlingly realised teachers and students, presided over by David Storey's most comic creation to date, R. N. 'Skipper' Wilcox, a man who equates food with art, art with the past, and the past with his own idiosyncratic passions and vices. Then there are the Newmans who have arrived, ostensibly, to transform the town: Elizabeth, the wife, on the lookout for pleasure; Rebecca, the daughter, on the lookout for experience; and Neville Newman himself, a city planner, on the lookout, with his strange and menacing gang, for authority and power. Like some gigantic happening, unannounced, unrehearsed - convened perhaps, thought one is never sure, by Freestone himself - these characters, shadowed by the disturbing presence of Freestone's wife, trace out a compulsive and at times seemingly ungovernable pattern. By turns hilarious, tragic and shocking, the novel progresses towards a climax which both mirrors and transforms, like a work of art, the lives of everyone involved.