THE label "Angry Young Man" was casually stuck on to every novelist who came from, and wrote about, working-class life during the period when the socially saturnine and strait-laced Fifties became the almost-everything-goes Sixties.
To modern ears, the phrase sounds anachronistic and even slightly quaint. But, at the time, it enabled the media to conveniently usher under the same roof those writers who were justifiably raging against the drearily class-bound and rigid convention
s of post-war Britain and breaking new, gritty ground in the process.
The Angry Young Men still with us after all these years now fall into the category of Reflective Old Men. To emphasise it, this month marked the 80th birthday of one of the most prominent: Alan Sillitoe,
who created the bellicose, brawling, beer-swilling Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
Not so long ago I heard Sillitoe say that he'd reached the age "where I'm too old to die young". The only unsettling thing for me about the sight of Sillitoe's 80 candles-on-the-cake is the fact that the light from them illuminates how old I've grown in the three and a half decades since I first ran each panting stride of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and devoured Sillitoe's short stories. I read the Yorkshire triumvirate: John Braine, Stan Barstow and David Storey. Their world was instantly recognisable to me because I lived in it, too. Sillitoe, however, was much closer to home. So close, I could catch a corporation bus to the streets and bars he wrote about in Nottingham, where I grew up.
His landmark birthday provides the hook on which to hang and then re-appraise the novels of that era. The best of them, such as Sillitoe's own, are worth reading for a lot more than satisfying your curiosity about obscure points of social history. The gilt of literary merit hasn't rubbed off them with age, and the books contain strong central characters, good writing and solid plotting. Each shows in some way the grimness and monotonous grind of working at the pit-head, on a lathe or behind a shop-counter, but also makes clear that the generation being written about is frustrated, resentful and plainly not content to robotically clock on and off and live in a row of identical red brick council houses. Rebellion hangs in the air as thick as pub smoke once did.
The ideas scarcely seem revolutionary in these more egalitarian days, but of course the novels need to be read in context. Sillitoe was among the writers responsible for changing the reading public's perception of the working man and woman – notably achieved without romanticising them.
It's sometimes an artist's fate to be remembered for one book, one film, one painting. Sillitoe is chiefly remembered for two. He is nonetheless still writing well; time hasn't wasted his talent, and he hasn't wasted his time. His most recent book Gadfly in Russia is a fresh, sharply observed travelogue of the journey he took across the country in 1967.
You might wonder what sort of fuel keeps an octogenarian going. Anger, perhaps. Talent, more likely.
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