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In 1957, when Americans took for granted electric ovens, hand-held mixers and finned cars, their British cousins were, comparatively speaking, just emerging from the cave. In a telling indicator, only 5 percent of working-class Britons owned a refrigerator, and only 12 percent over all. Yet this was the year that Harold Macmillan, the new prime minister, proclaimed, “Most of our people have never had it so good.”
1957年，当电烤箱、手持搅拌机、有侧翼轿车在美国已司空见惯的时候，他们的英国亲戚相对来说好像还刚从洞穴里钻出来。一个数据很有说服力：在当时的英国，只有5%的工薪阶层拥有冰箱，在整个人口中，只有12%拥有冰箱。同年，新上任的首相哈罗德·麦克米伦(Harold Macmillan)称：“我们当中的大多数人从来没有过这样的好日子。”
It was true. As David Kynaston documents, exhaustively and exhaustingly, in “Modernity Britain: 1957-1962,” the Macmillan years felt good to a country recovering from war, austerity and rationing. It was a period of full employment, rising wages, affordable consumer goods and artistic ferment, as new working-class voices made themselves heard in fiction, drama and film.
这是真的。正如大卫·基纳斯顿(David Kynaston)在他的《现代性英国：1957-1962》(Modernity Britain: 1957-1962)一书中详尽记述的，对于一个刚刚从战争中恢复过来、厉行节约、实行配给制的国家来说，麦克米伦的年代已经很好了。这个时期实现了充分就业、工资上涨，生活消费品更便宜了，艺术的发展也在酝酿之中，新兴工人阶层开始在小说、戏剧与电影中发出自己的声音。
The book, an all-enveloping and mesmerizing social panorama, continues Mr. Kynaston’s grand project of chronicling everyday life in Britain from the end of World War II to the beginning of the Thatcher era. Under the collective title “Tales of the New Jerusalem,” he has already completed “Austerity Britain: 1945-1951” and “Family Britain: 1951-1957,” whopping big books in which the author marshals vast quantities of data to create, dot by pointillistic dot, a vivid national portrait.
这本书是一幅包罗万象、非常迷人的社会全景图，是基纳斯顿按时间顺序记述从“二战”后到撒切尔时代初期英国的日常生活的宏伟计划的一部分。这个计划合称《新耶路撒冷故事》(Tales of the New Jerusalem)，除了本书，他已经完成了《节衣缩食的英国：1945-1951》和《家庭英国：1951-1957》两卷，在这几本巨著之中，他列举了大量数据，如同点彩派画家一样，一点点为这个国家描绘出一幅生动鲜明的肖像。
No fact is too large, no fact too small for Mr. Kynaston, whose scrutinizing eye delights in particulars drawn from diaries, memoirs, the daily press and a host of other primary sources.
对于基纳斯顿来说，没有绝对的大事，也没有绝对的小事，他那洞察一切的双眼从日记、回忆录、日报和其他重要来源中悉心寻找细节与详情。
“On Monday, 6 January 1958,” a typical passage begins, “a disgruntled housewife in Paddington gave her Detergent Survey interview to Mass-Observation; Dennis Dee in Winestead did ‘hedging and ditching at the farm’ amidst ‘heavy rain nearly all the day’; Madge Martin in Oxford went to ‘Barnacle Bill’ at the Ritz (‘amusing enough, but a little too farcical’).” There is more. Queen Elizabeth, we learn, “took Charles and Anne to the Bertram Mills Circus at Olympia (both the Royal children bounced up and down in the seats with excitement’); and all three treasury ministers resigned — a unique event in 20th-century British political history.”
他的书中，典型的一段是这样写的：“1958年1月6日星期一，帕丁顿一个闷闷不乐的家庭主妇接受了关于洗涤剂的民意调查采访；温斯蒂德的丹尼斯·迪伊(Dennis Dee)冒着‘持续整日的倾盆大雨’，‘在农场里扎篱笆，挖沟渠’”；牛津的马奇·马丁(Madge Martin)去了里兹影院看《巴纳寇·比尔》(Barnacle Bill)这部电影（‘它很有趣，不过有点太荒唐了’）。”还有更多内容，我们在书中读到，伊丽莎白女王“带着查尔斯和安妮去奥林匹亚看波特拉姆·米尔斯马戏团演出（两位皇子在座位上兴奋得跳上跳下）；同时三位财政大臣都辞职了——这在20世纪的英国政治史上是唯一一次。”
The fact stream flows on, page after page, like an unending newsreel. This is half the fun of the book, which proceeds at a lively pace in a brisk, appealing style. Mr. Kynaston, who seems to miss nothing, is like an air traffic controller, picking up incoming planes when they are tiny blips and following their progress intently throughout the book.
一页一页，无数事实流淌而过，就像永无止境的新闻电影胶片。这还只是这本书趣味的一半。除此之外，它还有着生动的节奏与轻松美妙的文风。基纳斯顿似乎什么都不会放过，就像空中交通管制员盯着屏幕上的小光点，密切注视着飞机的飞行情况。
Conservatives select a promising young woman, Margaret Thatcher, as their candidate for Finchley. The headline in the local newspaper: “Tories Choose Beauty.” Mike Jagger (not yet Mick) attends a Buddy Holly concert. A young actress named Judi Dench makes her debut as Ophelia at the Old Vic. The Evening Standard says she has talent and may get somewhere if she acquires some technique.
保守党选择了玛格丽特·撒切尔(Margaret Thatcher)这位大有前途的年轻女子作为芬奇利选区的议员，当地报纸当天的头条是：“保守派选了美女”。迈克·贾格尔（Mike Jagger，当时还没改名“米克”）去看了巴迪·霍利(Buddy Holly)的演唱会。一个名叫朱迪·邓奇(Judi Dench)的女演员在老维克剧团首演，出演奥菲莉亚一角。《旗帜晚报》(The Evening Standard)说她很有才华，如果再掌握点技巧一定大有可为。
The cultural markers of the period shower down like confetti: the first E-type Jaguar, the birth control pill, “Dr. No,” holidays in Spain, Beyond the Fringe, the first flavored potato chips (cheese and onion), the satirical journal Private Eye, the first legal betting shops and the 8.5-mile Preston Bypass, Britain’s first highway. Bronco toilet paper, described by Mr. Kynaston as “cheap, traditional, notoriously nonabsorbent,” tests new pastel colors, and on Dec. 9, 1960, the working-class soap opera “Coronation Street” airs for the first time. A critic for The Daily Mirror found it “hard to believe that viewers will want to put up with continuous slice-of-life domestic drudgery two evenings a week.” The show is still on the air.
这个时期的文化标志性事件像婚礼上的五彩纸屑一样向读者洒来：第一辆E-type捷豹汽车、避孕药、《诺博士》(Dr. No)、去西班牙度假、《边缘之外》(Beyond the Fringe)、奶酪味和洋葱味薯片、讽刺日报《私密之眼》(Private Eye)、第一批合法的彩票销售点，还有8.5英里长的普莱斯顿大路，这是英国的第一条高速公路。基纳斯顿说，野马牌厕纸“便宜、历史悠久，出了名的不吸水，”它开始尝试使用新的淡彩色；1960年12月9日，工人阶层肥皂剧《克罗内申街》(Coronation Street)首播。《每日镜报》(The Daily Mirror)的评论家说，“很难相信观众愿意每周花两天时间，忍受这样一部乏味的家庭琐事剧。”
Mr. Kynaston does not have an argument, but he does have some big themes. He traces the rise of a consumer society enjoying, for the first time, televisions and cars and washing machines — all the outward signs of the good life — and undergoing profound change as a result. Increasingly, the industrial proletariat — visible as never before in novels and films like “Room at the Top” and “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” — began to think of itself as middle-class, setting off an identity crisis for the Labour Party that continues to this day.
基纳斯顿并不争论，但他的书中确实有重大的主题。他追溯消费社会如何第一次开始享受电视、汽车和洗衣机——这是美好生活的外在特征——以及因此而带来的深刻变革。劳工阶级前所未有地在小说和电影中大量出现，诸如《顶层房间》(Room at the Top)和《星期六的夜晚与星期日的早晨》(Saturday Night and Sunday Morning)，他们开始自视为中产阶级，开始有了身份认同危机，今日的工党也仍旧如此。
Race is another big topic. Open immigration from the Commonwealth, attracting thousands of West Indians, put Britain on the road to becoming a multiracial society, a fraught process, underscored by race riots in Notting Hill in the summer of 1958.
种族是另一个大的主题。随着英联邦开放移民的政策，成千上万西印度移民开始涌入，英国开始走向多种族社会，这是一个令人忧虑的过程，1958年夏的诺丁山种族暴动更是其间的重大事件。
A hefty portion of the book is devoted to housing. Horizontal cities became vertical, as ambitious slum-clearance projects plunked down high-rise apartment blocks in cities from London to Glasgow and relocated Britain’s poorest citizens, in a vast social experiment that did not always end happily. “Across much of urban Britain, modernism was being imposed upon a deeply unmodernist populace,” Mr. Kynaston writes.
全书也有很大一部分写了住房问题。平房变成了楼房，从伦敦到格拉斯哥，雄心勃勃的贫民窟改造计划在城市里建起了高层公寓，令英国最穷困的城市居民有了住处，而这项宏大的社会实验的结果并不总是好的。“在英国城市的很多地方，现代主义被强加给非现代主义的大众，” 基纳斯顿写道。
Still, for the average Briton, life seemed sweet — or at least diverting — a far cry from the years of gray, postwar deprivation and slow recovery. It was not just appliances; it was Harold Pinter, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael Caine, Albert Finney, Peter Hall, Peter O’Toole, Benny Hill and many others. Mr. Kynaston’s lists and factoids really do go on and on and on, and American readers will be lost when it comes to many of the popular television shows, athletes, comedians and singers who figure in the narrative. Still, his total-recall approach does get across the flavor and excitement of the time.
不过，对于普通英国人来说，生活似乎很美好，至少也是在好转，和战后那段贫穷、灰色、缓慢康复的时光大不相同。不仅有家电，也有哈罗德·品特(Harold Pinter)、凡妮莎·雷德格雷夫(Vanessa Redgrave)、迈克尔·凯恩(Michael Caine)、阿尔伯特·芬尼(Albert Finney)、彼得·霍尔(Peter Hall)、彼得·奥图(Peter O’toole)、本尼·希尔(Benny Hill)等许多人。基纳斯顿的清单和陈述确实冗长，美国读者读到叙述中大量出现的流行电视剧，还有当红的体育运动员、喜剧演员和歌手时，可能会感到混乱。不过，作者的整体回忆确实把握住了那个时代的韵味与令人兴奋之处。
In the book’s final pages, a turning point looms. The Beatles perform on national radio for the first time, taking second billing to the Trad Lads on the show “Teenagers Turn.” John Profumo meets Christine Keeler for the first time. A new era beckons. But that is a story — a long one — for another day.
在全书的最后几页，一个转折点出现了。“披头士”(The Beatles)首次在全国广播电台演出，他们在“青少年节目”这个栏目中成了二号头牌，仅次于“传统孩子”(Trad Lads)。约翰·普罗富莫(John Profumo)第一次遇到克里斯汀·基勒(Christine Keeler)。一个新时代即将到来，但这将会是另一天的故事——另一个很长的故事。
