He was, whatever the complications of the prose, the sometimes cloudy metaphysical speculation, and the tendency toward melodrama, something more than an articulate representative of the new provincial working classes. As Storey explained in an interview given at about that time, he had attempted to show in
This Sporting Life the world of physicality, from which his protagonist could work his way to security and "dignity." He had, then, tried to balance that physicality with the consideration of a perspective more interior, feminine, and spiritual in
Flight into Camden. The split between these two points of view, the irreconcilability of body and soul in human experience, along with the religious implications of such an incompatibility, was the subject of the ambitious
Radcliffe. In 1963, when
Radcliffe was published, Storey planned a fourth novel that would reconcile body and soul, both in an individual and as a metaphor for the reconciliation of social classes in England. That reconciliation, at least in the form first envisioned by Storey, has not yet appeared. The first three novels, however, do contain many characters and situations that foreshadow those developed in the plays that follow. The physicality of the world of rugby detailed in
This Sporting Life is dramatized in
The Changing Room (1971).
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