From the opening paragraph, a literally stunning description of a clash between two players, to the final scene of grotty bodies in the bath, this 40-year-old study of rugby league in the industrial north of England circa 1960 shoves its unpalatable images into the reader's face with relentless vividness. This is no boys' own tale of torments and triumphs, but a grim struggle streaked with blood, sweat and back-biting; the hero, Arthur Machin, an innocent in a world of ambitions that are all the more dangerous for remaining unspoken, moves like a sleepwalker through a dismal landscape of mean streets and even meaner people. Everything in the novel is ugly and vaguely sinister, from the reconstituted slag-heaps under the pitches to the landlady with whom Machin has a seedy affair; all the more miraculous, then, that Storey, who was to win the Booker Prize in 1976 for Saville, keeps the same reader (even the rugby-hating female reader) turning the pages with a kind of mesmerised despair.
