How does it compare to audio works by the same author?
Advantages:
Gritty working - class realism from the 1950's .
Disadvantages:
A long way before political correctness .
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
Let me take you back to Nottingham in the late 1950's: Arthur Seaton is 21, and he works a lathe in the Raleigh bike factory all week long. But then comes the weekend...
He spends Saturday nights drinking like a fish, falling down and puking. And he's also shagging Brenda, the missus of a workmate. Naughty! Inevitably, he gets her "up the stick" (charming!) and, on the advice of his Aunt Ada, she tries to obtain an abortion by drinking a bottle of gin while sitting in a very hot bath for two hours. (One of the many bizarre and dangerous methods used in the days when abortion was still illegal.)
The books opens with Arthur falling down some stairs in a club after downing seven gins and eleven pints of ale to win a drinking contest with a loudmouthed sailor; puking on someone; and then going back to Brenda's house while hubby Jack is away.
Oh, and Arthur also has it off with Brenda's sister Winnie too. He even goes to Goose Fair with the pair of them while he's also going out with a nineteen-year-old girl called Doreen. And he has the brass neck to describe Nottingham women as "cheeky-daft" gold-diggers! Unfortunately for him, Winnie's hubby is a 'swaddie' in the army...
In 1960 a film of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, starring Albert Finney and Shirley Anne Field, was made on location in Nottingham. There is of course one particularly memorable scene in the film which lives long in the memory of an impressionable young Nottingham lad such as myself: the one where Arthur shoots "fat Mrs. Bull" in the cheek. Now, when I say cheek, in the book it is the cheek, whereas in the film...
Alan Sillitoe was born in Radford, Nottingham, in 1918. At fourteen, he left school to work in the Raleigh factory. Later he enlisted in the RAF and became a wireless operator. While posted in Malaya he caught tuberculosis. It was while convalescing in hospital that he began to write. Following the inevitable rejections, "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" was published in October 1958. His follow-up, a book of short stories called "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner", also received critical acclaim, and the title story, about a Borstal boy, was made into another classic Brtitish film of the 1960's (starring Tom Courtenay).
He now lives in Notting Hill where he still writes his novels by hand before typing them up on a manual typewriter (so he's unlikely to read this!) Forty years on, Alan Sillitoe has written a follow-up to "Saturday Night.." called "Birthday" which has just been published. I look forward to finding out what has become of Arthur Seaton, now he's in his sixties.
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