Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe

“Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can’t help being a rebel. You can’t deny it. And it’s better to be a rebel to show them that you’re not worth taking down. Factories and labor stock exchanges and insurance agents keep us alive and well.” kicking, they say, but they’re booby traps and they’ll suck you up like quicksand if you’re not careful and tax officers siphon money out of your pay packets and rob you to death and if you’ve got a little life left in guts after all this, the army calls you in and they shoot you dead. And if you’re smart enough to stay out of the army, they bomb you to death. Oh my God, it’s a hard life if you don’t get weak, if you don’t stop that bastard government from smashing your face in the drill, though there’s not much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow up the four-eyed clocks.”

I just spoke Arthur Seaton, twenty-one when we first meet him and twenty-four when we leave his life. He turns a lathe at a bicycle factory in Nottinghamshire, in the Midlands of England. He earns good money, up to £14 a week working piecework. He could work harder to produce more, but if he made the time and move, the man would penalize him, he would reduce his piece rate and work harder for the same money. The cup game. So, despite the earlier tirade about his status in his life, he’s already learned to do as he’s told, not take chances, and collect his pay on a Friday. At least that’s his technique at work. In private, he has less time for conventions.

He lives with his mother and pays her rent, or lodging as we call it in the north of England. It’s a terraced house, on streets that circle around the factory like suckling pigs, as he puts it. Much of his free time is spent in the pub, where he drinks pint after pint of ale and often follows her down with a liqueur or two.

Arthur is a big boy. He is tall, blond, well built and can take care of himself, so he believes. He is already seeing Brenda, a woman older than him and married to a senior colleague at work. She enjoys him and he enjoys her. He often has to leave her house through the front door when her husband arrives from the night shift. He is Brenda in two parts, dating another married woman named Winnie, when he meets Doreen by chance in a pub. Doreen is single.

He likes to go to the movies, wants to get married and sits on the shelf at nineteen. We are, by the way, in the late 1950s in working-class England.

Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was one of a series of books from that era that dealt with working-class life, in all its brazen and uneducated detail. At the time, these works shocked people. They repeatedly described life as it was, without the condescending lens of middle-class judgment or standards so commonly applied in English writing. Room at the Top, A Kind of Loving, and then Alan Sillitoe’s novel stand out because they became famous movies. Albert Finney, the actor, made a name for himself playing Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, albeit in monochrome, a quality that might also have added comment to the one-dimensionality of the lives depicted. He played the role of the over-the-top, hard-drinking, carefree antihero from Alan Sillitoe’s novel, but he didn’t overdo it. The character in print is probably more brazen, ruder than the script might suggest. In the end, Doreen may have reformed him, at least made him mainstream, but only after being beaten down by the best of husbands she was cheating on. What happened to the women involved, we are not told. Surely we can guess.

The book is written in the northern English dialect, not so northern, but certainly working class. For the record, the citation at the beginning of this review includes the term four-eyed watches near the end. For the record, in that particular dialect, this means faces with glasses. The implication, clear to anyone with the proper training, is that people are of the studious, middle-class, elementary-school type. In a way, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is like DH Lawrence a few decades later. But where Lawrence claims a certain dignity for the poverty of working-class life, Alain Sillitoe simply lists its characteristics, chiefly being consumerism, superiority, and materialism. It seems that there is no community here, but there is a lot of competition.

Some seventy years later, the text has dated. The racist assumptions of these people would not be publishable today, but they may still prevail. But in the end, they welcome Sam, a Ghanaian-born British Army sergeant, with open arms, perhaps because he has reached a rank to which they aspire, or perhaps simply because they dare not oppose him. And he sounds more civilized than the hosts of him.

But, as with many iconic works that summed up a bygone era and its assumptions, there remains a sense that, nearly three-quarters of a century after it was written, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning still resonates today. Material goods may have changed, along with the sums of money needed to acquire them. But the conflict of interests, the divisions of class and wealth, and the underlying assumptions that characterize the antagonism have remained largely unchanged, though they may appear in different garb today.