[In the following review of Forever England, Lehmann-Haupt finds weakness in Bainbridge's generalizations, though interest in her autobiographic reminiscences.]

Considering the differences between the North and the South in the United States, one might find it hard to believe that in relatively compact England similar disparities are thought to hold true. Yet that is the subject of Beryl Bainbridge's quirky new book, Forever England. As the author explains in her preface, the book is based on a television series “which, in an attempt to examine the roots of that evergreen assumption, the notion that England is two nations, focused on the expectations and attitudes of six families, three in the North and three in the South.” Much of the perceived difference is based on myth. Ms. Bainbridge, who grew up in Liverpool and is best known as a novelist, writes in her introduction. “In the South they rode to hounds and went to Ascot; in the North we kept pigeons and raced greyhounds. When we had our tea, people in London sat down to their dinner dressed up as if they were off out to a Masonic hot-pot supper.”

“All the same,” she continues, “these simplistic myths, matters of manners and money and location never for one moment obscured the real differences that separated us, hid the severing wound that well-nigh cut us in half and could never be healed, for hadn't we been plundered by the South, laid waste, bled white? It was not just industrial. They had drained away our talent and our brains; who had ever heard of anyone once they got on in the world, from William Gladstone to Thomas Handley, who had been content to stay in the North? We learned this from our parents.”

To test both myth and parental lore, Ms. Bainbridge interviewed people on the dole in Liverpool. Fishermen in Hastings, descendants of coal miners in Barnsley, the extended family of a financier in Bentley, sheep farmers in Northumberland and a multiracial family in Birmingham.

A few arresting generalizations emerge. “Up here in the hills we have crisis after crisis,” says the wife of a tenant farmer who keeps 2,000 sheep. “There's no time to consult with anyone else. It could make you very self-opinionated, this sort of life. If you were in the South, you wouldn't need to be so determined, so dogged.”

“It is a softer life down here in the South,” Ms. Bainbridge concludes after visiting with the fishing family in Hastings. “They're not given to self-analysis, and perhaps the so-called southern reserve is not so much a matter of unfriendliness as a detached complacency born of comparative affluence.”

But since the people she visited with seem selected to illustrate her various points, one finds it hard to put much stock in them as a sampling. Their main value is to fix in our minds the geographical distinctions of various regions in England.

Far more diverting are the autobiographical tangents on which the interviews inspire Ms. Bainbridge to take off. Her return to Liverpool triggers memories of her parents, of her father's contradictory ways—he lamented the loss of the empire yet always voted for Labor—and of her mother, whose hands were always full “painting the furniture and rearranging the ornaments.”

Her visit to Hastings reminds her of a novel she once wrote in which she had to send her protagonist on vacation somewhere. “I didn't think he should go to Brighton—Brighton was too flashy for him. So I chose Hastings. The name came out of my head like a number out of a hat. I say that, but then nothing is ever as random as it appears. In my opinion there's no such thing as imagination—in the sense that we have the power to form images of our own making—for unless we've already acquired images in the first place, from somewhere, how can we possibly summon them into existence, reformed or not?”

A discussion of politics reminds her of the Cuban missile crisis, when she was chosen to go and protest to the American consul but was “struck dumb with admiration” because he looked like “a cross between Gregory Peck and Rasputin.”

What emerges from these musings besides the portrait of an amusing, original, opinionated individual? Because Ms. Bainbridge rarely wastes a word in her fiction—the most recent of her novels are Master Georgie, Every Man for Himself and The Birthday Boys—you look for a hidden pattern here, some subterranean message that helps you to see beyond easy generalizations.

But in vain. Instead what you get is the story of one unusual individual. “If you come from the North as I do,” she writes, “and you left it, as I did, you have ambivalent feelings towards the old working communities. It's an uneasy mixture of pride and irritation, sentimentality and mistrust, for you broke away from a narrowness of outlook and a lack of expectation which well-nigh crushed you. And yet—the heart lies back there in the past, and everyone longs to return and find things just as they were, the arguments in full spate and the home fires still burning.”

In Forever England, Ms. Bainbridge doesn't find the home fires still burning. But she manages to set a few on her own.