David Kynaston resembles a novelist impersonating a historian. His books read like fiction disguised as documentary. They are full of vernacular diction – quotes from the indomitable Barrow-in-Furness housewife Nella Last, for example, or her fellow diarist, the Yorkshire horse-breaker and pig-breeder Dennis Dee – and delve into truths about human character, impulses and motives in ways associated with novelists rather than the common ruck of historians. Kynaston's acclaimed multi-volume history of Britain since 1945, with its overarching title "Tales of a New Jerusalem", resembles a roman-fleuve: a sequence of novels, each one complete in itself, depicting successive phases of national life, or successive generations of a family, of the sort that Balzac, Zola and Proust produced.
Kynaston's work is avowedly indebted to Anthony Powell's sequence of 12 novels, A Dance to the Music of Time, with their interplay of the personal and the public, their juxtaposition of intimate domesticity with national destiny, and their stress on the significance of life's banalities. Five elegant, vividly memorable books have been published by Kynaston, with individual titles – A World to Build, Smoke in the Valley, The Certainties of Place, A Thicker Cut and now Opening the Box – that often echo the titles of Powell's dozen. Hitherto his design has been obscured because the publishers have lumped the first four books into a couple of big, unwieldy volumes; with Opening the Box, Kynaston's inspiration is clearer.
His method evokes the sumptuous messiness of human experience. He depicts history as an unfolding, ill-managed pageant in which politicians, opinion-makers and cultural leaders stumble through their parts amid sharp vox pop interjections from such characters as the sensible, zestful Chingford housewife Judy Haines, the Welsh curmudgeon Frank Lewis and a Luton factory worker called Bradbury producing the spanking new Vauxhall Victor. Like Powell, Kynaston is attracted by people who make compromises, accept second-best, live dingily and submit quietly without relinquishing hope. In his 2009 lecture on A Dance to the Music of Time, subtitled "One Historian's Inspiration, Exasperation, Consolation", Kynaston quoted a remark of one of Powell's characters: "It is no more normal to be a bank manager or a bus conductor than to be Baudelaire or Genghis Khan. It just happens that there are more of the former types." This belief is what makes his books so enriching, improving and endearing.
This fifth volume opens with the day in January 1957 when Harold Macmillan succeeded Anthony Eden as prime minister in the aftermath of the Suez debacle. It closes with the resounding re-election of Macmillan's Conservative government in October 1959. The reasons for Labour's defeat had been foreshadowed by its party leader, Hugh Gaitskell, in a private conversation of 1958. "Labour is a high taxation party, Labour is a trade union party, Labour is a nationalisation party and Labour is not as sound as the Tories on foreign issues," he lamented.
Kynaston, in this shrewd, funny and ever-readable book, depicts Britain in 1957-59 as a country chafing at traditional puritanical paternalism, and both gullible and indiscriminate as it edged towards tacky, often destructive forms of modernity. Britain was a prim nation where, until 1957, there was a total ban on TV programmes between five and six in the afternoon to make it easier for parents to put children to bed without tears about what they were missing on "the box". Similarly, the BBC refrained from reporting byelection campaigns in news bulletins lest it be accused of influencing voters, until Granada's coverage of the Rochdale by-election in 1958 established TV as the new hustings.
The big themes of this book are economic decline, the flux of social class and the obsolescence of socialist nostrums. The Labour party, regarding all private profit as "obscene", was, he claims, increasingly out of kilter with working-class voters.
Big money-making was generally deplored as a semi-criminal racket, although modest affluence was craved and the consumer culture began to blossom. In one of his neat miniature scenes, Kynaston shows some youths in a pub during the 1959 general election, chanting the TV advert jingle "The Esso sign means happy motoring", but switching off in disgust when a party political broadcast was aired.
The subtle, unsentimental and never condescending discussions of class are a highpoint of this book. Kynaston deprecates the idealisation of traditional working-class communities by sociologists and intellectuals. Their exaltation of working-class traditions over middle-class values led to the persistence in the Labour party of an increasingly sham proletarian identity, he argues.
Kynaston, who surpasses himself in dealing with human geography, notes that a bonus of overspill new towns, such as Stevenage, Crawley or Hemel Hempstead, was their distance from stifling family traditions in the slums. He reports the view "that working-class wives are relieved to put thirty miles between themselves and 'Mum'; that she is no longer there to interfere with her aboriginal warmth, her glutinous, devouring affection. Young wives have … suddenly found that they can do without them."
Although a gentle writer, Kynaston is astute about violence. His discomforting chapter about racism, xenophobia and shoddy nationalism is timely in the age of Ukip and EDL. His picture of Enoch Powell championing two irreconcilable ideas, the argy-bargy of free-market economics and the controls and repressions entailed by English nationalism, should be compulsory reading for all swivel-eyed loons.
He is also alert to mob-bullying of individuals. Terry Dene, an 18-year-old bicycle messenger, timber-yard labourer and odd-job man in a clock factory, had some months of fame as a pop singer before being conscripted into the army. His persecution by fellow soldiers drove him into a psychiatric ward, and necessitated his military discharge. When he attempted a comeback with a northern tour, his vulnerability excited all the thugs. Slogans of GET YER 'AIR CUT were daubed on theatre walls. His performances were greeted with jeers, boos and a claque shouting, "Left, right, left, right," until his career crashed into oblivion.
The spirit of the late 1950s was brash, gimcrack modernity. It was epitomised by the planners' and developers' headlong drive to bulldoze old terraced buildings, build ring roads, erect tower-blocks and jettison the past. Kynaston's account of the dehumanising of British townscapes is shocking. One quintessential cameo is his account of the opening of London's first traffic flyover, at Chiswick, by the film star Jayne Mansfield, dressed in scarlet, blowing kisses to the wolf-whistlers, and declaring "It's a sweet little flyover." A few streets away Conservatives held a protest meeting against "a fine British achievement" being inaugurated by a foreigner.
In Kynaston's history books, the reader can hear the people speak. He has an elocutionist's sense of people's diction. The babel of voices and accents, their snarls, their drawls, their short, clipped phrases or long, flowing rambles, their clarity or muddle, their eagerness or depression, reveal their regional origins, their class, their temperament.
One encounters an uptight civil servant, Henry St John, watching CND marchers ("average age about 20, of the intellectual type, hardly a hat among them"). Gladys Hague, an elderly spinster living with her sister in Keighley, mixes public reportage ("the 2nd Russian Satellite launched with a dog on board") with social observation ("Fathers on holiday seem to have more fun than the mothers who are left in chairs to keep an eye on the family possessions", she noted of a weekend at Bridlington). Marian Raynham expresses both national unease ("how everywhere is changing") and private frustration ("Why should I spend all morning makes scones? Seem to be spending all my life doing these foolish things") from a Surbiton perspective.
Kynaston is too gleeful in his approach, and too compassionate in outlook, to be a prig. Yet his books are those of an old-fashioned moralist. He thinks, as Victorian idealists such as George Eliot did, that the purpose of good books is to teach one how to live better. He believes in good and bad, and in the importance of discriminating between them. He respects individuals, and cherishes individuality, but hates the political cult of individualism that licenses egotism, greed and disrespect for the weak. Community life, neighbourliness, modest striving, a sense of life as a mishmash of experiences rather than an ornate tapestry, are upheld by him. He nudges his readers into doing their best.
• Richard Davenport-Hines's An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo is published by HarperPress.