The Good Companions The Good Companions The Good Companions is a novel by the English author J. B. Priestley. Written in 1929 (in Deal, Kent), it focuses on the trials and tribulations of a concert party in England between World War I and World War II. It is arguably Priestley's most famous novel, and the work which established him as a national figure. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was adapted twice into film. The novel is written in picaresque style, and opens with the middle aged, discontented Jess Oakroyd in the fictional Yorkshire town of Bruddersford. He opts to
An Inspector Calls and audiences have interpreted Goole’s role as an "avenging angel" or a supernatural being because of his unexplained omniscience, his prophetic final speech in which he says that humanity will learn its lesson in "fire and blood and anguish" (referring to the First World War, two years after the setting of the play 1912) and even because of his name, which is a homophone for the word "" (meaning "ghost") and is also the name of a seaside town (which could possibly be a reference to the time period in the play when Eva Smith stays in a seaside town