The Stars Look Down - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

The novel centres on three very different men:

• David Fenwick comes from a mining family but is drawn towards politics, aspiring to help his people, and becomes a strong supporter of nationalisation. Initially, he finishes up his baccalaureate degree and is a teacher at a school for the children of miners.
• Joe Gowlan begins as a miner, drifts and then becomes upwardly mobile as a bookie's assistant and a war-profiteer.
• Arthur Barras is the son of Richard Barras, the unscrupulous owner of the Neptune Colliery. He is unhappy with his father's values but also feels too weak to do much about it.

Reactions to the failure of industrial action on safety issues in the coal mines are crystallized in the characters of Davey and Joe, who take vastly different routes in escaping from the working class. While Davey becomes an MP in order to fight for nationalisation of the mines, Joe essentially joins the mine owners.

Jenny Sunley is Davey's indifferent wife who craves social status, and other characters have short but distinct tales of their own. Cronin shows a broad sympathy for the workers and a dislike of the bosses, but also allows that at least some of the bosses can be decent at a personal level.

Central to the story is the Neptune coal mine and a catastrophe that occurs there. The Great War is also a factor: do you volunteer to fight, volunteer for non-military duties, use trickery to evade service or openly defy the system by refusing call-up? There is a brief description of one of the tribunals that examined conscientious objectors, often refusing to accept their objection as valid. There is also a clear commitment to the idea of nationalising the mines, replacing the mass of small private owners that existed at the time.

The novel ends with most of the men much changed, and it is an excellent description of working-class life in the North of England during that period.