If the term had existed in 1962, critics would have labelled Personal File a “mid-life crisis” novel. It is certainly a novel of middles. George Park is middle-class, midway through life’s journey, midway through his career, midway in the ranks of the civil service.
As the book opens, he is about to face an Establishment Panel, which is a euphemism for a promotion panel. He realizes that this could be, effectively, his last such panel:
Everyone knows that this is the promotion which matters. If you stop here beyond … say, about forty-two, you probably stop here indefinitely. If you make it, then in ten or twenty years you might even take home a medal. If I don’t get it this time I probably won’t get another Panel for about three years. Then I’ll be forty-two. The odds against will be longer then.
George does not do well. To forget his failure, he leaves work early and goes to the movies. There, he becomes infatuated with one of the ice cream girls and, rashly, decides to ask her out, in what has to be one of the worst sales jobs in the history of romance:
It’s not that I am interested in you. You represent everything I have not got: youth, love, warmth, happiness. Of course, I have no excuse for not having them. I have children — nice ones — and a wife. But my life is empty, dry. I might be a vegetable, or an electronic computer.
“I like to hear you talk,” the girl replies, and she agrees to meet him for a drink.
Looking at this description, George’s affair with Lily, the ice cream girl, seems completely unbelievable, but in the book it comes across as only somewhat unbelievable. George is fascinated by her beauty, her casualness, her working-class life; Lily is amused by his awkwardness, touched by his tenderness, and glad of something to lift her out of her boredom. Never for a moment do we or they think of this as anything permanent.
Jones contrasts George’s situation with those of his colleague Peter — recognized by all as the more competitive — and of the Junior Minister they both work for, a rising star from their own year at Oxford. All three men are at crucial points in their careers. The poses of their college days are “now hardened into attitudes; it was no longer a game.” The Junior Minister’s success is tempered by the miserableness of his marriage. And Peter is obsessed with fears that he is just one mistake from seeing his promise transformed into disgrace.
George’s pessimism deepens when he considers the example of his own father, whose “life had not been as he had expected”:
He had won none even of the modest prizes which had seemed within his reach, had inspired no special affection among his colleagues. Even his family had comforted him only moderately…. He now slept a good deal during the day, did nothing by which one day could be distnguished from another, had no plans for the future.
In the hands of a writer willing to inflict real pain upon his characters — someone like Richard Yates, who never hesitated to peel away that last layer of self-respect — Personal File could have been a truly powerful novel. But there’s a certain reluctance to deal with serious levels of discomfort that dulls the book’s impact.
When you learn a bit about G. O. Jones, you get the impression that he was neither invested enough in the book nor sufficiently misanthropic to sacrifice his characters. Gwyn Owain Jones was something of a Renaissance man. A pioneer of low temperature physics, head of his department at Queen Mary College, who left science at the age of 50 to become director of the National Museum of Wales. He was an admirable administrator, a manager who brought out the best in his people, a leader who sought to improve the institutions he ran. An amateur musician, he also managed to write Personal File and several other novels in the course of his very busy life.
Anyone who’s worked a large bureaucracy, and particularly civil service, will recognize the world and characters of Personal File, even though sixty years have passed since its publication. This does not, however, mean that it’s anything but a respectably well-crafted piece of middlebrow male fiction. For me, it was far more interesting than something of similar caliber involving espionage or adventure, but no more than a satisfying evening’s read.