Villagers

Are people today greatly different from those of fifty or a hundred years ago? asks the author of Villagers. These eighteen short stories are set in the England of the 1880s to the 1950s, in a fictional community that has its own trade rivalries, committee-room struggles, romantic attachments, follies and forlorn hopes, delights and dark secrets. Many of these tales from our rural past are based on fact - on the author's own family experiences - and many have the beat of Britain's industrial heart in the background. Near the village are canals, coal barges, mills, the tentacles of industry and the hum of the local city. Indeed, the last story, 'Something Very Special', with its clang of trams and vivid portrayal of back-to-back housing, has distinct notes of D H Lawrence - but more charm than he tends to offer. Two other tales stand out: a good-humoured account of a teenage girl looking for adventure and finding it, in the form of a Frenchman in a smart car; and the sharply observed chronicle of the exploitation of poor Ellen's talents and handicaps by her businesslike sister, Ann. Do people still 'use' each other in this way - albeit unwittingly? Have we really changed that much? Reading Villagers will tell you otherwise.