Hugely authentic, a voice from the working-class with a distinct flavour of D H Lawrence, this debut novel was published in 1958 and was an immediate success.
We first meet Arthur Seaton (who describes himself thus: "I'm a bloody billygoat trying to screw the world, and no wonder I am, because it's trying to do the same to me." C 15) when he falls down a set of stairs in the pub, having won a drinking competition. Contesting is what Arthur does best: he sleeps with the wives of other men, he shouts and fights like any barnyard rooster, he drinks to put other men under the table. He's even good at his job, earning £14 per week on piece work, making machine components on a lathe. Since he gives his mam £3 per week for bed and board, he has plenty left for his fancy teddy-boy clothes, his drinking, and his fast women.
Written in dialect, Sillitoe gives us a portrait, warts'n'all of a working class lad in Nottingham. It is bursting with verisimilitude. Sillitoe tells us in the introduction that it was originally a series of short stories and this is evident in the final novel. The hero progresses through a year in a series of episodes in which he is transformed from billygoat into hooked fish, as all young studs mature. It is a classic 'coming of age' tale with the exception that the hero starts out macho and ends up domesticated, a sort of reverse of the Hobbit. But the power of the story does not lie in its plot. Sillitoe has created a character in Arthur Seaton who is firmly rooted in the working-class culture of 1950s Nottingham; he encapsulates its mores, its assumptions, its prejudices and its way of life. But never is that class spoken down to. Seaton is an articulate young man, full of mature reflections about himself, and the world, and his part in it. In some ways he is the classic outsider, able to look upon the world and consider it. Yet at the same time he is thoroughly a part of it. For this, and for the lashings of realism, this book is a classic.
Selected quotes:
- "For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week." (C 1)
- "He was laughing to himself as he rolled down the stairs, at the dull bumping going on behind his head and along his spine, as if it were happening miles away, like a vibration on another part of the earth's surface, and he an earthquake-machine on which it was faintly recorded." (C 1) I love the way he uses Seaton-like words like 'earthquake-machine' rather than 'seismometer'; Seaton is incredibly intelligent and articulate but he has his own vocabulary.
- "From her constant use of the word apologise it seemed as if she had either just learned its meaning ... or as if she had first learned to say it by spelling it out with coloured bricks at school forty years ago." (C 1)
- "You got fair wages if you worked your backbone to a string of conkers on piece-work." (C 2) What a description of the spine!
- "The on'y thing the army cures you on ... is never to join the army again. They're dead good at that." (C 2)
- "He wanted all her troubles for himself at that moment. It was easy. He had only to take them and, having no use for them, throw them away." (C 3)
- "Rain and sunshine, rain and sunshine, with a blue sky now on the following Sunday, and full clouds drifting like an aerial continent of milk-white mountains above the summit of Castle Rock." (C 5)
- "Arthur stood up and hit him, putting into his fist all the bursting irritation of the past few weeks." (C 6)
- "I was on the dole eighteen months ago ... We all had a struggle to keep alive and now they want to call us up ... Do yer think I'm going to fight for them bastards, do yer?" (C 9)
- "Nobody's satisfied wi' what they've got, if you ask me. There'd be summat wrong with the world if they was." (C 10)
- "Stars hid like snipers, taking aim now and again when clouds gave them a loophole." (C 12)
- "When he stopped looking at the wall he lay back to sleep, and awoke after violent yet unrememberable dreams to see the grinning frantic face of the cheap mantlepiece clock telling him that only two minutes had gone by." (C 13) 'Unrememberable' is another Seaton word.
- "Life was like that, he thought, you floated down on a parachute, like the blokes in that Arnhem picture, pulling strings this way and that so that you could put out your hand to each something you wanted, until one day you hit the bottom without knowing it, like a bubble bursting when it touches something solid, and you were dead." (C 13)
- "He sat by the canal fishing on a Sunday morning in spring, at an elbow where alders dipped over the water like old men on their last legs, pushed by young sturdy oaks from behind." (C 16) A beautiful description of a scene and utterly metaphorical. Seaton has been a roaring boy trying to upturn the old order. Yet, as we shall soon see, he is also on the cusp of joining the old.
- "For himself, his own catch had been made, and he would have to wrestle with it for the rest of his life. Whenever you caught a fish, the fish caught you, in a way of speaking, and it was the same with whatever else you caught, like the measles or a woman. ... As soon as you were born you were captured by fresh air that you screamed against the minute you came out. Then you were roped in by a factory, had a machine slung around your neck, and then you were hooked up the arse by a wife. ... Without knowing what you were doing you had chewed off more than you could bite and had to stick with the same piece of bait for the rest of your life." (C 16) Another Seatonism: 'in a way of speaking' rather than the normal 'in a manner of speaking'.
- "He looked into its glass-grey eye, at the brown pupil whose fear expressed all the life that it had yet lived, and all its fear of the death that now threatened it." (C 16)
Also by Alan Sillitoe:
- The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner: a brilliant short-story
- Raw Material: a memoir in which he mentions his grandfather the blacksmith, also referenced in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning as Seaton's grandfather.
- and many other books
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