many not-so-happy returns (Birthday - Alan Sillitoe)

Member Name: pje

Product:	Birthday - Alan Sillitoe
Date:	23/06/01 (165 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Poignant, erudite and realistic.

Disadvantages: Despondent, disillusioned, and pessimistic; and a bleak view of disability might not go down well.

"The older you get the more people around you kick the bucket."

So says Arthur Seaton, the angry young man of Saturday Night
and Sunday Morning, who is now a grumpy sixty year-old man.
It has taken Alan Sillitoe forty years to return to the character
that made his name, but it has been well worth the wait.

But first, for the benefit of those of you not from Nottingham,
or not old enough to remember Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or who haven't read my review of it elsewhere,
you have some catching up to do...


The Author
'''''''''& #39;''''' 9;'''''''
Alan Sillitoe was born in Radford, Nottingham, in 1918.
He left school at fourteen to work in the Raleigh bike factory.
Later he enlisted in the RAF and became a wireless operator.
He caught tuberculosis while posted in Malaya and during
the time he spent convalescing in hospital 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. The title story, about
a Borstal boy, was made into a classic British film in the 1960's

as was

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
'''''''''& #39;''''' 9;''''''''' 9;'''''' ;'''''''''' ;'''''' '''''''''' ''''''& #39;'''''''''& #39;'
in which the young Arthur drinks a lot, falls down, pukes, shags Brenda - the missus of a workmate (getting her "up the stick"
and in need of a
back-street abortion) and gets beaten up by
a "swaddie" for shagging Brenda's married sister Winnie too.
He ends up getting engaged to a 19-year-old girl called Doreen.

The 1960 film version of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, starring Albert Finney and Shirley Anne Field, shot on location in Nottingham, featured particularly memorable scene where Arthur, armed with an air rifle, shoots "fat Ma Bull" in the cheek...


Birthday
'''''''''& #39;''''' 9;'
Now, forty years on, we see through the eyes of Arthur's elder
brother Brian on his many not-so-happy returns to Nottingham.
Brian left home at eighteen and became a television scriptwriter,
and this book opens with him returning to go to a surprise 70th
birthday party for Jenny - an old flame he used to go a-courting,
(well, they had a quick fumble on her parents' settee at least) when they were seventeen.

Jenny is now widowed after spending more than twenty-five
years looking after her husband George, paralysed following
an accident at the iron foundry where he worked. George never really came to terms with his misfortune and lived on resentfully. This presents a bleak picture of disability painted with old-fashioned bluntness that has no truck with political correctness.

There's nothing so vulgar as a plot here, just the past mingling with the present via reminiscences; a collection of observations on the way society has changed; and some catching up on the last forty years in the lives of the Seaton family.

We discover that Arthur did marry Doreen, but that they split up after ten years and two children. The Seaton brothers lost two sisters to cancer, and Arthur's new love Avril has is stricken too.
Understandably, the angry young man is now a bitter old one,
and many of the changes in society are an anath
ema to him:

"When we were kids we walked anywhere, day and night,
and nothing would happen. Nowadays, if I wanted to leave my car on the street for a few minutes I'd put a nice looking hip flask on the back seat, but it would have poison inside so that whoever broke in and took a sip would die in agony."

There's more to old age than bitter nostalgia though, as he says:
"You live in order to create memories..."

So despite the air of despondency that pervades it, "Birthday"
is a wonderful novel by a writer in the Indian summer of his career. I was rapt within a page or two, savouring his rich descriptions of the way we used to live. Mind you, it does tend
to read like one long moan about how things was better in them days even though we had nowt...

Sillitoe now lives in Notting Hill, where he still writes his novels
by hand before typing them up on a manual typewriter - and this
is the key, I think, to the dissatisfaction he expresses in this book at the way society has changed. To someone who eschews technology the modern world must seem less human nowadays.

But sometimes he hits the nail right on the head, like when he bemoans what happened during the so-called "slum clearance" programme that took place in the late 60's and early 70's:

"...bulldozing whole districts and throwing up high-rise hencoops was ordained by those who made enough money from the business never to have to live in them."

I know. I was born in a old-fashioned Nottingham street which was pulled down back then. Luckily we moved to a proper house and never had to live in one of the rabbit warrens of cardboard-walled prefabricated hen-coops that replaced many such streets.

But let's not forget that those old houses only had outside loos.
It seems hard to believe now, but for the first six years of my life I had to go to the
bottom of the yard to use the lavvy!
And we only had a handful of hot gravel for us breakfast, before we traipsed through t'snow t'school in us bare feet. But you try telling the kids of today that and they won't believe you!
Look he's got me at it now!


Interestingly, Sillitoe, as narrator, says of Brian:

"I sometimes wonder though whether he wouldn't have been happier staying where he had been brought up."

Well come home then Alan, er, I mean Brian.


This book will be enjoyed by grumpy old gits everywhere,
everyone in Nottingham and hopefully the Booker prize judges.

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