Written in 1960, A Kind Of Loving fits into the kitchen sink tradition, prominent in Britain at the time. Deeply rooted in its Yorkshire setting, it is very much concerned with the real people, with their everyday problems, hopes and experiences.

The protagonist, Victor, is a young, bright working class son-of-a-miner, just discovering females, and focussing on one young woman in particular.

The first half is essentially about Victor falling in love, and while the evocation of these feelings is very well done, this section does wear a little eventually. But it is necessary to set up the later sections where things get more complicated for Vic, and the book regained my interest.

It's a very good book - compellingly realistic, with real-world, relatable concerns and well depicted characters. Possibly the most distinctive thing about the book, though, is Barstow's wonderful use of the Yorkshire dialect. In his hands the language is so rich and expressive, it really elevates A Kind Of Loving from an interesting story to a compelling and immersive novel. ( )

https://lizzysiddal2.wordpress.com/2022/06/07/a-kind-of-loving-stan-barstow-1960... ( )

Stan Barstow's A KIND OF LOVING (1960) has never been out of print, so that's 62 years now, and that's saying something. I ordered it after seeing a note in the TV listings last month about the 1962 film adaptation that starred Alan Bates. It sounded vaguely familiar, and I may have seen the movie at an army theater in northern Turkey all those years ago.

It's a great read. I thoroughly enjoyed it. A kind of "hardboiled," one-sided love story, narrated by 20 year-old Vic Brown, a mechanical draftsman with a small engineering firm in northern England in the 1950s, still living at home with his parents and a younger brother. (His older sister is newly married.) His dad is a miner, now a foreman, who has spent some forty years 'down the pit.' Vic falls for Ingrid, A pretty typist at his company, and they begin dating, and engage in casual sex over several months, always stopping short of "going all the way." Until finally they do, and guess what? Yup. And Vic has to marry her, even though he's long known he doesn't love her, because it was the fifties, and that's what you did when got a girl pregnant. And, since there wasn't much money, they moved into her parents' house. Ingrid's dad is a salesman, on the road most of the time, but he and Vic get along well. Her mother, on the other hand, is a whole different matter.

So it's this domestic drama, I guess you'd call it, all about the sexual mores of the times, and how the upwardly mobile lower middle class of England lived, how they struggled towards a better life. Vic is not the most admirable character in the way he uses Ingrid, who really does love him, but he has this dream of finding a girl who would have interests that would more closely match his own. I liked Vic's father, Arthur, and Ingrid's old man too. The mother-in-law, however, is a horror. But I'm not gonna tell you the whole story, okay? You'll just have to read it yourself.

Other readers - and critics too - have compared Vic Brown to John Updike's Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, but I don't see that. True, they both feel trapped, but Vic doesn't run. He stays, if unhappily. And Barstow's style is nothing like Updike's. But there are two sequels to the Vic Brown story, just as there were sequels (three) to Updike's RABBIT, RUN. Maybe I'll follow up. Because I really did love this book. There is indeed, "a kind of loving" in it. Very very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )

I read this book in 1979 and loved it ( )

Oh it's a great life and we've only another thirty or forty years of it to come"
By sally tarbox on 31 December 2017
Format: Kindle Edition
First published in 1960, this is a tale of a distant era; Yorkshire miner's son Vic Brown is going places, with a job as a draughtsman, a supportive family and enough money to enjoy himself. Despite his laddish behaviour, he's an intelligent guy; and when he takes up with pretty but vacuous Ingrid, he soon realises her limitations.
But love and lust become confused, and soon Ingrid has some unwelcome news for her reluctant boyfriend...
While others have commented negatively about Vic as a person, I found I felt some sympathy for his plight, forced into marriage with someone he has nothing in common with. As a narrator, he really comes alive with his frank Yorkshire dialogue.
Last read when I was in my teens - now 40 years later, it's still a great read. ( )