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 prominence, he inadvertently reveals his social rank to be lower than that of his wife's when he compliments the cook right at the start of the play, and by his continual need to assert his social importance. His status as an alderman and former Lord Mayor of Brumley is repeated several times in the play, with increasing comic effect. Early in the play, he also makes a series of thoroughly-explained and justified predictions about the future world, all of which the audience knows will not come true, such as describing the Titanic as "unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable" and saying that "the