"Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" by Alan Sillitoe

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. It was chosen by Anthony Burgess as one of his 99 best novels since 1939.

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

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Road to Wigan Pier" by George Orwell

A classic of proletarian literature.

Orwell liked political discourse. His most famous novel, 1984, contains a long extract from a political tract written by the arch enemy of Ing Soc. This book starts with wonderful journalism, describing working class life in the north of England between the two world wars, and ends with several chapters of tedious, probably outdated, politics.

But it starts brilliantly with a description of a filthy tripe shop cum lodging house in which OAPs subsist in shared bedrooms an bread and butter imprinted with the filthy thumbprint of the landlord. Despite receiving a pension, without extra savings an OAP cannot survive on their own. Nor can they live with a son or daughter if that person is unemployed and on the dole because if they do so they will be counted as a lodger and the dole will be reduced to the extent where the whole family will starve. So they have to eke out their sunset years in undignified misery.

The book continues with wonderful descriptions and haunting images of poverty. He describes a slum girl, glimpsed momentarily from a train, whose face wears "the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen ... she knew well enough what was happening to her." He uses this image to refute the concept that the lower orders are dumb brutes and don't mind poverty and squalor.

He also admires the "superhuman" coal miners ("The miners' job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on the flying trapeze") with "their noble bodies". But in very hot mines, where it is necessary to go about half-naked, most of the miners have what they call 'buttons down the back' - that is, a permanent scar on each vertebra" from not bending low enough when they are crouching through the tunnels. They are also tattooed: "Every miner has blue scars on his nose and forehead, and will carry them to his death. The coal dust of which the air underground is full enters every cut, and then the skin grows over it and forms a blue stain like tattooing, which in fact it is."

He draws the following lessons:

• "It is so with all types of manual work; it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its existence."
• Educated bourgeois are no more gifted than anybody else but "have the cheek necessary to a commander."
• "The price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt."

This first part of the book was so well-observed that it was mesmerising, like rubber-necking at the site of a car crash. But he can also turn a phrase:

• Dismissing conspiracy theories: "What I have seen of our governing classes does not convince me that they have that much intelligence."
• "Sheffield ... could justly claim to be the ugliest town in the Old World."
• "the dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of 'progress' like bluebottles to a dead cat."
• "A Yorkshire man in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior."
• Of self-made men: "Though he might be narrow-minded, sordid, ignorant, grasping and uncouth ... he knew how to make money."
• Of the way certain novelists depict women: "every married woman is an angel chained to a satyr.

Cut most of part two with its dreary politics and you will have a wonderfully written book, even more powerful (perhaps because it is journalism rather than fiction but probably because of the vivid description) that Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole. These books need to be remembered so that Britain never again exploits its people as it did then.

Well worth reading. May 2016; 204 pages

Here is a review of Orwell's biography by Michael Shelden

Orwell also wrote a memoir of the Spanish Civil War called Homage to Catalonia, the political satire Animal Farm, and a memoir of time spent tramping in England and dishwashing in France called Down and Out in Paris and London.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God