John Braine’s The Jealous God was published in 1964, shortly after his box-office hit Room At The Top and its sequel, Life At the Top. Braine was one of the original “angry young men”, those upstarts in English life, who had not been nurtured at all by the conventional establishment, and who at least began their careers by attacking and lampooning its safe conventions and patronizing assumptions. At least that’s how they started…

However, by the time we get to the mid-1960s and The Jealous God, there are already signs, now apparent where previously only implied, of the author’s apparent longing to ally himself with convention. Adopting the established thinking of him, however, still seems to be an awkward relationship, still fraught with self-doubt and at least some guilt.

The Jealous God, like most of Braine’s work, is set in what was once the West Riding of Yorkshire, with its uneasy marriage of coal, wool and engineering, along with a deeply traditional agricultural sector in which medieval landlords still They had their share. Imbued with notions of class loyalty, the region’s inhabitants rubbed shoulders as they walked the same streets, but voted according to social class for different political parties, displayed completely different cultural identities, and drank different drinks in different pubs.

Unlike Room At The Top, The Jealous God lives solidly in the lower-middle-class world of a history teacher at a Catholic boys’ school. And that too, though not a problem here, would have been a Grammar School, so very few working-class boys would have been present at Vincent Dungarvan’s discussion classes, and even fewer of them would have ever spoken. It is the Roman Catholic faith of Vincent and his family that is central to the plot of the book.

Fifty years later, a reader can be forgiven for assuming that homosexuality and child abuse may also feature as topics, but that simply isn’t the case. Vincent Dungarvan may regularly, albeit subliminally, question his faith, but he never abuses it.

Vincent is a teacher. He is polite, but perhaps also pedantic and a bit pedestrian. In fact, we rarely follow him into the classroom and, unlike most teachers, he hardly ever talks about his work in his off hours. He seems like he rarely spends his time marking. She is already thirty years old and still a single virgin. Her mother, a devout and guilt-stained widow, truly hoped that she could become a priest, but at her hints he worries that she is continually sinning, either through lack of conscience or by embracing Onan.

Vincent himself seems not to have really had a past. His present one starts on page one and rather progresses from there. One feels that there could be more to tell, but not much is shared. He has two brothers, one who drinks too much and neglects his frustrated, child-laden wife. The other, more successful but intellectually inferior, seems to be a mainstay of the family convention, even with seventeen-inch televisions and house extensions. Vincent also has a grandmother who seems pious, philosophical, or pragmatic at his whim. Grandparents often are.

John Braine’s book proceeds to examine events that see Vincent in the arms of two different married women, both, for different reasons, remaining inaccessible until he can free himself from the chains of his own and his mother’s faith, a question apparently impossible. Guilt is associated with momentary ecstasy, always mixed with disbelief and doubt. He seems willing to be flexible, but goes back to typing every time he starts to bend. Eventually, and unfortunately, he becomes a kind of vehicle for the statement of women’s dilemmas, although these were probably not at the forefront of the author’s intentions. Although Vincent seems to want to embrace convention, the circumstances he finds himself in, coupled with his own reactions to them, repeatedly place him at odds with the very assumptions he deep down wants to uphold. And then there are questionable kinship, dilemmas of ideology, and buckets full of guilt to negotiate, especially as he negotiates with his own conscience over what to do with Laura, the seemingly unlucky librarian. Laura’s own dilemmas are the most interesting, but we approach them only through Vincent’s interests.

But what is ultimately fascinating is how John Braine conveniently offers his characters redemption. Having seemingly started out as a free spirit, Vincent eventually finds himself willingly embracing convention, albeit under circumstances he could never have imagined. As a snapshot of his time, The Jealous God remains a completely captivating book. As a catalog of how its author migrated from angry young man to mainstream conservative, it is both informative and vivid.