'Bringing all the power and richness of his tale as a short story writer to this, his first novel, Brian James creates an unforgettable picture of a man who always did the right thing.
Spencer Button is a hero who completely lacks heroic qualities. At heart he is romantic and likes to cut a good figure; but he is conventional, careful and ambitious, and timidity and circumstance relentlessly mould him. The chief enemy to his development as a human being is, in fact, the Public Service - an ogre he has served since boyhood; and the assiduity with which he studies his advancement in the Department destroys him as a man. For Spencer Button is a State school teacher.
Iron humour and a fine sense of the ridiculous both make and heighten the tragedy that is Spencer Button. This is the unspectacular tragedy of everyday life, infinitely moving when realized. But upper-most is the irresistible humour of characters like Auntie May and Uncle Fred, of episodes like the inspection of Selkirk school and the coming of the new music master to Simmons Street.
Brian James has a penetrating grasp of character and an astonishing range of mood. Off-setting portraits of exquisite absurdity are scenes that are masterly in their macabre pathos: The downfall of Winnie Ogg, the object of Spencer's first romance; the disintegration of Mr Foll who sacrifices himself to his son's career. Spencer's courtship of Susie, their marriage and its formal banality, his discovery of the warmth and vitality he has missed - these are so acutely drawn as to be almost painful in their reality.
Pedagogic grievances and ambitions, jealousies and snobberies, eternal and never-changing, are shown against a panorama of Australian life from the nineties to the present day. It is an impressive picture of infinite variety, an arresting and challenging story that never fails as entertainment.' (Publisher's blurb)
