Books
Brave new writing
Fifty years ago, Alan Sillitoe’s first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, changed the history of English fiction. Richard Bradford explains how.
As a man who has witnessed the dehumanising consequences of totalitarianism, both in its shambolic Spanish manifestation — he was once arrested by Franco’s secret police in Barcelona during the 1950s — and as Communism in action, he perceives the present Labour regime with a mixture of horror and disbelief. ‘They are’, he tells me, ‘leading an apathetic population into a state of torpid subservience.’ He refers, of course, to the suffocation of individuality via greater powers of intrusion and surveillance and, worst of all, through the introduction of ID cards.
They [the government] offer risible justifications for what will if enforced be an obligatory licence to exist and breathe. Stalin’s tomb must be quaking from his laughter.
Alan Sillitoe is still routinely perceived and presented as a member of the kitchen-sink branch of the Angry Generation. Such characterisations are lazy and inaccurate, obscuring the breadth and originality of his writing. Among his 52 volumes — including novels, short stories, children’s fiction, poetry, travel books, drama, memoirs and criticism — there are works that defy classification. Travels in Nihilon (1971), inspired by his experiences in the USSR, invokes the tradition of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley’s Brave New World, but supersedes both in its manner. It is as though Finnegans Wake has been unselfishly rewritten, with coherent sentences and a story, and it offers a magnificent evocation of totalitarianism, inhumanity and farce. The Storyteller (1979) is one of the best ever novels about the pitiless, unforgiving nature of writing, and The General (1960) is the fictional precursor to Wladyslaw Szpilman’s The Pianist, later filmed by Roman Polanski. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959), the volume which followed Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, introduced Alan as the most accomplished short-story writer in English since Joyce. Read his work, marvel and enjoy.
Richard Bradford’s The Life of A Long Distance Writer: The Biography of Alan Sillitoe will be published later this month. He is currently working on the authorised biography of Martin Amis.
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David Martin
September 5th, 2008 5:22pmBy giving Arthur Seaton the same initials as himself, I assumed Alan Sillitoe indicated the character was to some extent his alter ego. Presumably he's been asked about this, but if so I've not seen his answer.
Odd how some of the feted first novels of the decade from the mid-1950s - "Lucky Jim", "The Outsider", "Room at the Top", "A Kestrel for a Knave" as well as "Room at the Top" - were unsurpassed by their authors' later books.
An interesting tribute to Sillitoe, though the tone evokes the Alan Bennett character who says "If you live to be ninety in England and can still eat a boiled egg they think you deserve the Nobel Prize."