John Braine’s Jealous God – From Anger to Convention

John Braine’s The Jealous God was published in 1964, shortly after his blockbuster 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 fully nurtured by the mainstream establishment and who at least began their careers attacking and satirizing its safe conventions and condescending assumptions. At least that’s how they started…

Yet by the time we get to the mid-1960s and The Jealous God, there are already signs, now evident where before only implied, of the author’s apparent yearning to ally himself with convention. The adoption of established thinking from him, however, still seems to be an awkward relationship, still filled with 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 where 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 entirely 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 an all-boys Catholic school. And that too, though not an issue 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 ever have spoken. It is the Roman Catholic faith of Vincent and his family that is central to the book’s plot.

Fifty years later, a reader can be forgiven for assuming that homosexuality and child abuse can also figure as themes, but they simply don’t. Vincent Dungarvan can 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 during his break 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, genuinely 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 begins 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 family convention, even with seventeen-inch televisions and extensions of houses. 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 unapproachable until he can free himself from the chains of his own and his mother’s faith, a question seemingly impossible. Guilt is associated with momentary ecstasy, always mixed with disbelief and doubt. He seems willing to be flexible, but returns to writing whenever he starts to bend. Eventually, and unfortunately, he becomes something of a 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 the conventions, the circumstances in which he finds himself, along with his own reactions to them, repeatedly place him at odds with the very assumptions that he, deep down, wants to uphold. And then there’s questionable parentage, ideological dilemmas, and guilt-filled buckets to negotiate, especially as he negotiates with his own conscience what to do with Laura, the seemingly hapless librarian. Laura’s own dilemmas are the most interesting, but we approach them only through Vincent’s interests.

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