Customer Reviews

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Signet)

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Sillitoe's work shows Arthur living his life to the extent his class boundaries will allow. Drinking, womanising, and violence dominate Arthurs life away from his lathe. We follow him on the breathless ride that is his life in the first part of the novel Saturday Night, and then on his reajustment to a calmer more sustainable life in Sunday Morning. The perspective the reader is given is Arthurs if only he could articulate it. This allows the reader to experience the working class perspective without the limits that somone lacking the education to express themselves as effectively would have. This is the key to the novel as the reader can utterly empathise with Arthur. A working class novel that does not focus on poverty but how class frustrations are expressed makes a welcome change.

A working class man in northern England, Sillitoe bring to life the way it used to be. Between cups of tea, Woodbines, too many pints for sobriety and a long list of ladies, our man Arthur spends his days in mindless bicycle manufacture and his nights forgetting it all. There is the smell of coal smoke in the winter air, the taste and crunch of fried bread and bacon, the scent of a woman and the hard reality of no exit. Arthur came from a family who had spent too many years on the dole, a situation now repreating itself in England. Prosperity was a full larder and an endless supply of cigarettes and new clothes. Sillitoe has captured it all in a book which still breathes the life he infused into it almost 40 years ago.

Alan Sillitoe was one of a number of young writers who emerged in the late fifties and sixties and who have become known as the "kitchen sink" school. (Other members of the group included the novelists Stan Barstow, John Braine, David Storey and Barry Hines and playwrights such as John Osborne and Shelagh Delaney). Their work was distinguished by a social-realist concentration on working-class life, often with a provincial setting.

"Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" from 1958 was Sillitoe's first novel, and probably the one for which he is best known today. (His other widely known work is the short story collection "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner", particularly the title story). It is set in the author's native Nottingham and tells the story of Arthur Seaton, a young worker in a bicycle factory. Although Sillitoe himself had worked in a factory and had given his hero his own initials, he always denied that the novel was autobiographical.

Reading this book, I was struck by the contrasts between it and another 1958 study of a young man from a working-class background, Colin MacInnes's "Absolute Beginners". MacInnes's nameless hero, a self-employed London photographer who lives in his own flat, is part of the new teenage subculture of the late fifties, a young man whose main interests are the latest trends in music and fashion. He is teetotal, more at home in coffee bars and nightclubs than in pubs. His self-description as an "absolute beginner" refers both to his youth and inexperience and to his desire for a world as different to that of his parents' generation as possible.

Arthur at 22 is only four years older than MacInnes's hero, but leads a much more traditional working-class life. He still lives at home with his parents and his main leisure interests (apart from chasing girls) are drinking in the pub and spending Sunday afternoon fishing, occasionally reading the "News of the World" or watching a football match. Rock-and-roll and modern fashions seem to have passed him by. In fact, it is much the same sort of life as his father might have led in the 1920s, and not all that different to the one his grandfather might have led a generation before that.

In many ways Arthur is not a particularly admirable character. He is a heavy drinker; the opening chapter is a description of a drinking bout in a working man's club one Saturday evening, which ends with him falling down the stairs drunk. He is also a womaniser with a weakness for older married women; he is conducting affairs with Brenda, the wife of a colleague at work, and Brenda's sister Winnie, who is also married. These illicit relationships, however, do not prevent him from courting Doreen, an innocent teenager who remains blissfully ignorant of Arthur's other affairs.

In his defiant attitude to all forms of authority and his self-centredness he has something in common with Smith, the criminal anti-hero of Sillitoe's "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner". In both cases their rebellion against authority is an individualistic one; both are Labour supporters by default, in that they come from backgrounds where it would be virtually unthinkable to support any other party, but neither has any belief in Socialism or in the idea that the working class can improve their lot through political action or trade union activity.

Yet in Arthur's own words (a quote later made famous by the Arctic Monkeys) "whatever people say I am, that's what I am not". It would be too easy to dismiss him simply as a drunken, rebellious troublemaker. The fact that a recreation as tranquil as fishing is one of his favourite pastimes suggests that there is a more peaceful side to his nature. Unlike Smith, he is smart enough to realise that if he fights the law the law will usually win, and although he occasionally engages in minor rowdyism he prefers to earn his living by honest labour rather than by criminal activity. The book ends with Arthur preparing to marry Doreen, having given up his two affairs after being beaten up by Winnie's soldier husband; the implication is perhaps that he has learned his lesson and is starting to take a more responsible attitude to life.

Unlike his father, who was frequently unemployed during the depression of the thirties, Arthur is fortunate enough to have come into manhood at a time of economic prosperity, a time when Britons were being assured by their Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, that they had "never had it so good", and is able to earn a reasonable wage by working hard. And yet, in Sillitoe's view, "never had it so good" was still not good enough. One of the themes of the novel is the way in which the class divisions of pre-war Britain still persisted despite the post-war economic boom. Arthur is clearly intelligent and articulate, yet has only received a basic formal education and is unable to find anything other than mundane and repetitive factory work. His anger and resentment against the "System" may stem from frustration at being unable to put his intelligence to more creative use.

Sillitoe stated in his introduction to the book that some of its chapters started life as self-contained short stories and even poems which were then fitted into the novel, and it may be that this method of working was responsible for occasional structural gaps. (For example, in the early chapters Arthur has two brothers, Sam and Fred, but Sam seems to drop out of the picture in the later ones and his name is given to another character). Nevertheless, with its strongly drawn central character and its striking, unsentimental picture of working-class Midlands life, "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" is a most impressive first novel.

I say without hesitation: this is one of the best books I ever read and has now become one of my favorites. By the same author as "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner," and is sort of an expansion of that same main character. It's written in a mixed 1st/3rd person style, and it's highly entertaining, as well as a great statement on life in general. I don't want to spoil it for you, but if you like British novels of the 40s & 50s, then this is right up your alleyway.

one of the best books i have ever been forced to read. my english class is reading it. an awesome novel.