The Vodi (1959) was Braine's second novel, successor to the seminal Room at the Top. Braine was an Angry Young Man and so his is hero here, Dick Corvey. Corvey is confined to a sanatorium with TB, which was a major plague in Britain as late as the 1950s. He feels he is under a death sentence. Even if he does recover, he can never hope to marry or find a decent job, such is the fear of contagion - even pub landlords keep special glasses for TB types and throw them away as unfit for use by normal people.
Everything in Dick's life has gone wrong all at once. His father's business is on the skids, Dick's fiancee has deserted him for a normal, healthy man. Dick childishly blames the bogey-woman he and his friend Tom dreamed up as schoolboys - Nelly, headwoman of the ratlike Vodi, who dwell in and the under the woods on the fringes of town. Once Nelly has got her four teeth into you, she never lets go.
The novel is extraordinarily powerful, Braine, who died in 1986, never equalled the success of Room at the Top, and was always defined by that book. Ultimately he wrote a follow up, Life at the Top, and scripts for the TV version Man at the Top. I had heard about The Vodi - mainly that it was not up to the Lampton saga. Room at the Top I read and admired - and I was an absolute fan of Man at the Top with one of my favourite actors Kenneth Haigh. But The Vodi is absolutely of the same standard. Dick Corvey is not as iconic as Joe Lampton but the writing here is superb. The descriptions of life in the industrialised North as it is about to begin its long slow death are captivating, those of the way we so recently treated TB sufferers are jaw-dropping.
Read it, not as good as Room At The Top and a bit XI Form Common room - we had smoking chairs.
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