All enthused for the first 100 pages; then I felt like I was just reading the same chapter over and over again. ( )

Daylight on Saturday is set in an English aircraft factory during World War II. Priestley spent time visiting such factories in order to gather material for the novel; the title refers to the long hours which the workers spent inside the windowless buildings, with their only glimpse of daylight on their days off.

The novel is set in a series of linked chapters, each one following one particular character, foreman to girl-on-the-work bench to engineer to odd-job man. Many small daily incidents leading up to an improbably dramatic concluding episode make up the mild action of the novel; it is more of a series of vignettes and semi-analytical thoughts on the war and the nature of war work than a compelling piece of stand-alone fiction. In other words, not one of Priestley's better efforts, but one which I am glad I read, if only to make me better acquainted with the writer and his world.

The novel shares a setting with Monica Dickens' similar wartime novel, The Fancy, but Dickens does characters so very much better than Priestley - at least in this novel - that her book is one of my favourites for communicating the thoughts and feelings and the physical realities of wartime England among the factory workers. Priestley's people verge on caricature; his world feels just a shade too stage-set and artificial. ( )