Present Times

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Frank Attercliffe, at forty-seven, is growing old: 'so old he could scarcely remember the vicissitudes of his youth - the austerity, the circumspection, the detrivation, the challenge - even the fervour linked to enterprise, initiative and aspiration.' Nevertheless, confronted by a wife who insists on returning home after leaving him for a richer man, by his five children and their multifarious demands, he struggled to re-animate the virtues of his past: a sportswriter and formerly a professional footballer, he faces the additional tribulation of losing his job, a fate finally overshadowed by the death of his own friend. Amidst a world of racialist agitation and feminist propoganda, of mental breakdown and filial distress, Attercliffe, in middle age, steps out - not on to the field of sporting endevour but into the arena of contemporary events. David Storey, whose recent novels have so eloquently evoked the rural Yorkshire childhood of his past, here turns unflinchingly to the subject of family life in present times.