Saturday Night And Sunday Morning - A retro review
...nd steel, and pounding his brain towards migraine; hence he lives his working life in defensive, automatic mode. Mentally he escapes from the monotony of the factory, plotting instead to blow it up: Seaton is the typical 'Angry Young Man'. Living his life like this, facing the inexorable path of factory work, military service and eventual marriage (all three as inescapable as death itself) Saturday night comes as an interlude, 'the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, on of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath.' (9) Trying desperately to avoid the human route of settling down, Arthur's Saturday nights are spent in the beds of married women, first Brenda, and later her sister; all the time the danger of meeting violent reprisal at the hands of wounded husbands adding to the excitement. Ultimately, of course, Saturday night passions meet the cool thinking and repentance of Sunday morning. 'Whenever you caught a fish, the fish caught you, in a way of speaking, and it was the same with anything else you caught, like the measles or a woman. Everyone in the world was caught, somehow, one way or another, and those that weren't caught were always on the way to it.' Likewise is Arthur snagged by respectable, single Doreen. The exuberance of Arthur's character permeates the book. He rails against not the meaninglessness of war, but rather the lot of the working class man to bear the burden. Seaton's motto is not to 'weaken', to maintain constant vigilance, and his cunning and humour in the face of his amorality / immorality make for fascinating reading. For Seaton, branded with this grim life, the inescapable path makes for joyous tussles and affirmation. When he is finally caught ('weakens', perhaps) by Doreen, he does so with good grace, anticipating a life of enjoyable to-and-fro with her. There is much in Sillitoe's authentic rendering of 50s life that jars with modern existence in Britain. Ironically, racial portrayals hang in harmonious stasis, written at a time, one imagines, before these same working class communities felt that the welcome visitor became a plague of foreign immigrants, stealing jobs, housing and women. Black soldier Sam is welcomed as an oddity, but faces none of the ill-will that incoming communities faced by incoming communities from the end of the 1950s onwards. Perhaps what seems most at odds for the modern reader is the portrayal of masculinity, and, resultantly, female roles. There is an endearing simplicity in the representation of bare, yet arguably ignorant feelings co...