I generally hate novels about the working class: the writers either have a very low opinion of our intelligence, or they worship us as improbable saints. John Bemrose sees us as losers, the other extreme from that of Jack London’s The Iron Heel, whose hero Ernest Everhard fought the employers’ oligarchy, and won the boss’ daughter.

John Bemrose’s tale is centred on a factory, Bannerman’s Mills, at one time the largest knit-goods manufactory in Canada, recently taken over by a larger concern, its workers awaiting the inevitable re-organisation and redundancies. The hero Alfred Walker is a ‘fixer’, what here in Britain we would describe as a millwright or fitter, he is employed at the mill to repair and maintain the machines in the knitting mill. As a skilled worker he expects and gets deference from the semi-skilled ‘knitters’ (who need him to repair their knitting machines to enable them to carry on with their piece-work). They look to him to give a lead when the occasion arises.

The problem with getting Alf the fixer to give a lead is that he sees himself really as Alf the Foreman. His inclination is that of the old working class chant ‘The working class can kiss my arse; I’ve got the foreman’s job at last’. Anyone who expects him to lead them will have a long wait. The story opens as Dyson, a union organiser, appears at Alf’s home; from experience unions know that take-overs mean struggle and struggle means union members. Alf will have none of it, his ambition what it is. As the union organiser leaves, the tale introduces the Walker family, a family of losers.

Alf’s wife Margaret, the mother of his two sons Joe, eighteen, and Jamie, eight, is unable to get sexual pleasure from the act, which leads Alf to look elsewhere in the direction of the local ‘slapper’, whose eight year old half-breed Indian son Billie plays with Alf’s Jamie. Billie leads Jamie into the arms of Candyman John, the local paedophile. John, the teenager, meanwhile, falls in (unrequited) love with Annie, the daughter of one of the mill’s new managers. Unfortunately he has to try and win her from her rich, flashy car-owning, boyfriend. Now if this isn’t soap opera, I don’t know what is.

Of course they all come out as losers. Whilst Billie considers having the Candyman fellate him for toffees as combining pleasure with sustenance, no big deal, Jamie enters a life of nightmares and traumas. John loses the girl and walks off into the sunset (blimey we’re not going to have a sequel are we?), Alf gets burned to death when attempting a rescue, as some of the younger mill workers, angered at the mill’s closure, burn it down. Alf is then posthumously accused both by owners and workers of having a hand in the arson. Oh. No. How unjust!

First novels are traditionally autobiographical, so John Bemrose is probably as wimpish as his characters. The book was hailed in Canada as a beautiful, magical novel, which has caused me to view Canada henceforth as a wimpy version of the good old USA.