“Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” This motto encapsulates the ethos of the bloke, the male social type investigated in David Castronovo's engaging study. The bloke may be distinguished from the bohemian, the hooligan, and the rake, although he may also manifest some of their characteristic behaviors. Most significantly, the assertive and hedonistic bloke is a “bad boy” who defies the courtesy and dignity of the gentleman. This belligerent mode, one decidedly more provincial than cosmopolitan, became pivotal to British culture after World War II. Yet the bloke does not suddenly arrive at midcentury in the heyday of the so-called Angry Young Man and depart at the onset of the sexual revolution in the 1960s. Castronovo proposes a transhistorical genealogy of the type spanning from Geoffrey Chaucer to Nick Hornby. In this manner, he transcends labels that arbitrarily restrict the range of postwar British writing. At the same time, his sweeping hypothesis emphasizes thematic continuity rather than historical change. Castronovo's comprehensive approach to the contested category of masculinity sacrifices the conceptual precision and social complexity featured in more specialized scholarship on the 1950s. The stylistic flair of this accessible survey, however, promotes an entertaining and suggestive discussion.
Blokes, a book of literary criticism in the belle-lettristic tradition, omits a formal bibliography, footnotes, and an index. Four of eight chapters focus on writers in the new Britannia (1945–65): Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, and Kenneth Tynan. Osborne, the least privileged of these men, appears in a striking pose on the cover. The introduction outlines predecessors, including Charles Dickens, Henry Fielding, and, perhaps most influentially, D. H. Lawrence, whose controversial novel Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) instigated a famous obscenity trial in London in 1960. Conversely, the final chapter nominates successors Martin Amis, A. A. Gill, and Hornby, notwithstanding contemporary feminism and multiculturalism. Two complementary chapters on desperation and rebellion explore relevant works by Alan Sillitoe, John Braine, David Storey, and others. Castronovo recalibrates his typology in keeping with the variable circumstances and antimodernist sensibilities of diverse authors. Unresolved tensions between collective paradigms and individual styles, and historical contexts and thematic configurations, however, signal a haphazard methodology. Like blokes before him, Castronovo distrusts theoretical language. Throughout, he defends a biographical framework, recalls key events, and showcases close readings of literary genres.
Castronovo evokes the artistic preoccupations of gifted writers in the light of personal struggles for “manly integrity” (53). Whereas deprivation displaces exaltation in Larkin's idiomatic verse from The Less Deceived (1955), Osborne hones the rhetoric of ridicule in Look Back in Anger (1956), a watershed drama of domestic dysfunction. In general, blokes fight to feel alive: they often reject standard scripts of maturation culminating in adulthood with its grim sequelae of job, marriage, offspring, aging, and death. Larkin, for instance, pursued serial affairs although he neither married nor had children; ambivalent attitudes to women inform many bloke biographies. However, homosocial bonds loom large, ranging from Kingsley Amis and Larkin's anti-intellectual club at Oxford to Tynan's bullfighting ring in Pamplona. The book also appraises the bloke dynasty of father and son, Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis, respectively. Castronovo champions the universal appeal of the elder novelist by upholding James Dixon in Lucky Jim (1954) over John Self in Money: A Suicide Note (1984): “Jim is about ourselves, about men of some understanding and spirit up against the timeless suspects—the inept boss, his favorites, the whole degrading system” (184). Castronovo thus rehabilitates an anachronistic fellow: the beleaguered midcentury bloke is everyman.
Unfortunately, Castronovo risks reproducing the blind spots of his subjects by neglecting substantial scholarship on gender and sexuality. Building on his prior monograph, The English Gentleman (New York, 1987), he maintains that the bloke and the gentleman embody general tendencies rather than fixed qualities. Yet this broad continuum precludes many modes of masculinity. For example, Sillitoe's traumatized war veterans in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959) admittedly trouble this rubric. Castronovo endorses the traditional outlook on binary gender roles articulated by Harvey Mansfield in Manliness (New Haven, CT, 2006). Hence, although Castronovo acknowledges domineering behavior, such as Patrick Standish's rape of Jenny Bunn in Kingsley Amis's Take a Girl Like You (1960), he overlooks systemic male domination and its destructive effects on men and women. Unruly daughters, sisters, mistresses, mothers, and wives play marginal roles in bloke life and literature; exceptions include Nellie Beatrice, Osborne's controlling mother, and Valerie Hammond, the grieving widow in Storey's This Sporting Life (1960). Noted women writers, such as novelist Doris Lessing or playwright Shelagh Delaney, fall outside the purview of the book. Castronovo mutes critical perspectives on male entitlement despite the emergence of second-wave feminism in the 1960s.
Is “bloke” a viable term for cultural analysis? The restive male, in this reading, is a “party of one” who espouses singularity at the expense of collectivity (94). Castronovo arguably underestimates professed political allegiances and unconscious group dynamics in his examination of postwar social flux. Class affliction does not necessarily determine vocal disaffection in the 1950s, as the Oxbridge pedigrees of many blokes illustrate. But Castronovo often discounts left- and right-wing affiliations, including Communism and Conservatism. His humanist orientation mystifies ideological investments without clarifying the historical import of thematic antitheses. The bloke's fixation on death and vitality, for example, one of the most important contrasts in the book, warrants more sustained attention. Larkin and his generation, a cohort born in the 1920s, grappled with the daunting legacies of the world wars. When Tynan declares, “as a critic, I had rather be a war correspondent than a necrologist” (121), he adopts battle as his leading metaphor. How did mass death and postimperial decline shape opposition to moribund conventions, norms, and roles at midcentury? To his credit, Castronovo's lively exposition revitalizes fascinating figures and compelling texts. Regarding the elaborate interplay of culture, gender, and politics in Britain during the Cold War, however, the typology of the bloke generates more questions than answers.
