The characters are sharply drawn, entirely believable and people you want to know better and care about. But this is truly a great novel, whatever your politics may be. The author gives what I perceive to be a realistic portrayal of the pettiness and self-centeredness of the worker, as well as the capitalist, which I believe is largely accurate. I give him credit for portraying the 'working man' as something other than the ideal hero many on the left want to portray him as. He did not have the irrefutable evidence that socialism, communism, extreme left wing politics simply do not work in the real world. But I can forgive this because I know the world was much different at that time than now. My only reservation is the obvious socialistic politics of the author. I am not familiar with the reader, but he is as good as any I have encountered. The writing, character prortrayal, plot development, scenic description and narration are superb. A true classic, which stands alongside Cronin's other huge book, The Citadel.īut for the occasional ultra-liberal, even socialist, bias portrayed at various points, I would have given this 5 stars or even more if that were possible. It's about the morality of power, about war, about social injustice. This is a book about several topics, not about miners alone. Cronin's style is both descriptive and terse his dialogue is very believable, and the narrator does a very good job with both. The narrator does the dialect very well, but to be frank, it is so thick in places as to be difficult to understand.

There is a huge number of subsidiary characters as well. Cronin tells, basically, the stories of three families: Arthur Barras and his mine-owner father David Fenwick, whose father and brothers are all miners, and his mother and Joe Gowlan, who's determined to stop at nothing to amass as much power and money as he can. Coal mining, although very changed since then, has never been without danger or poverty. Long, but deeply interesting, even though it tells of a period which seems remote to us now.

Cronin's classic early works, describing the lives of miners in northern England.

The Stars Look Down by A.J. Cronin