It's also a powerful story of political awakening. This was the book that made "working class" pursuits beautiful. But Sillitoe's writing, with its sharp tang of cold mornings and warm pubs, has a cumulative lyricism which makes you feel Arthur's pangs as achingly as he does. Modern readers are unlikely to be shocked by his unsentimental affair with the married sisters Brenda and Winnie. Arthur - a bright, cocky lathe-worker given to fighting, fucking and fishing first, meditating on the system that keeps him in his place second - lives wholly in the rowdy bosom of his extended Nottinghamshire family. Unlike Osborne and fellow "angries", Sillitoe doesn't even pay the establishment the compliment of dramatising its decline. But then it doesn't need to: Sillitoe's account of the rebellious young factory-fodder hero Arthur Seaton was timely when first published (four years after the London premiere of John Osborne's Look Back In Anger) it is timeless now. H arper's fiftieth anniversary edition of Sillitoe's working-class classic doesn't add much value in terms of new editorial apparatus.
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