He has no ambition to speak of other than to look after himself. He fishes, fights, sleeps with other worker’s wives, goes to the pictures, drinks, works. Arthur works at a lathe in a bicycle factory, making just enough money to drink his way through the weekend. He then drinks another pint and then vomits in someone’s face before fighting his way out. Its opening demonstrates how the protagonist, Arthur Seaton, could teach contemporary binge-drinkers and ASBO-holders a thing or two: ‘With eleven pints of beer and seven small gins playing hide-and-seek inside his stomach, he fell from the topmost stair to the bottom’. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a raw, aggressive novel that is unapologetic in its presentation of ‘real’ life.
This fascination with the rawness of working-class life provoked debates which still rages – is making the anti-hero an icon just a way of controlling them is sensationalist presentation simply caricaturing? This interest collects together figures as diverse as Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz (whose ‘Free Cinema’ documentary movement was massively influential), Ken Loach, John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Keith Waterhouse, Nell Dunn, and John Braine. From the mid-50s onwards the post-war boom, increased prosperity and the beginnings of a youth culture fostered various movements which were interested in attacking the establishment and representing the lives of those ordinary, dispossessed workers who were generally ignored by higher culture. He is also part of a wider cultural phenomenon of 1955-65 which focussed attention on the working-class.
Alan Sillitoe is generally included as part of the ‘angry young man’ movement of the late 1950s, novelists and dramatists who wrote with passion and polemic energy.
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