The gods were not looking favourably upon me in the latest Classics Club spin. After the ultra long Armadale that I landed in the previous spin I was really hoping this time I would get one of the short books in my list of twenty. Instead, I got one of the longest — Fame is the Spur by Howard Spring. It’s about 670 pages long. Sigh, sigh and more sighs.
Published in 1940, Spring’s novel traces the life of Hamer Shawcross as he progresses from humble origins to the very top of the political ladder. While many of his friends remain true to the socialist causes, Shawcross ends up becoming part of the upper class he had fought against as a young man.
In essence it’s a novel about ambition set against the background of the rise of the socialist labour movement in Britain from the mid-19th century to the 1930s. From what I’ve read, there are some occasional appearances by key figures in the Labour party, including the founder of the Labour party, Keir Hardie.
Some parts of the novel are set in South Wales and deal with the hardships faced by the coal mining communities and the miners’ struggle for better wages.. Although Howard Spring never lived in those communities himself, as a journalist on a local newspaper, he would have known about the unrest in those communities and how that fuelled the creation of the Labour party.
Spring left Wales in 1911 to pursue his journalistic career on more prestigious titles, eventually moving to The Manchester Guardian. He became a novelist in the 1930s with a book for children in 1932 and then his first book for adults, Shabby Tiger in 1934.
By the time of his death in 1965 he had published twenty seven novels and three plays of which Fame is the Spur is his best known (partly I suspect because it has been adapted both for film and TV). It evidently hasn’t stood the test of time very well because there is only one copy in our county library system and even that is stored in the basement along with other seldom requested books.
According to the rules of the Classics Club spin I “should” read this book by 3 March 2024. Hm, we’ll see how that works out.
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