[In the following review, the critic argues that Sillitoe's A Start in Life is not as good as the author's earlier work.]

In the stories in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner （1959） and The Ragman's Daughter （1963） and in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which also began as sketches of life in Nottingham, Alan Sillitoe was able to recreate, in its own idiom, a whole vein of experience which had usually got into literature only as material for comic character stuff in the way of Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion or for militant reportage in the way of Orwell's Wigan Pier. The life concerned is one of hard-grafting, in all sense of that word—of living in old rows of industrial housing, working in down-town factories, getting outlet and satisfaction through semi-licit or illicit pleasures, from screwing the overlooker's wife to shooting foxes on a Sunday.

The idiom matters as much as the experience. Its hard snap and unpredictable humour still crop up in his novel of 1965, The Death of William Posters, whose title （not really made good in the book） is based on the splendid joke that “Bill posters will be prosecuted” means the authorities have it in for a scapegoat called Posters. In this new novel[, A Start in Life,] that sort of voice can be still heard in snatches, like “Her middle name was Audrey, which she favoured most, Tawdry Audrey from Tibshelf, who got off the bus one Saturday night in Worksop market place.”

This ability to root his art in the life of the poorly-off has made Sillitoe our outstanding portrayer of what Arthur Miller has called （in his classic introduction to his Collected Plays） “that sub-culture where the sinews of the economy are rooted, that darkest Africa of our society from whose interior only the sketchiest messages ever reach our literature or our stage.” It is presumably what Raymond Williams means when he speaks （in The English Novel） about finding in Sillitoe and David Storey late “followers” of Lawrence, a “narrower, more jagged edge” of evoked communal experience. Sillitoe himself, in a recent Guardian interview and in his introduction to the Heritage of Literature edition of Saturday Night, has repudiated the label of “working-class writer.” But the label is surely invidious only when it implies that the artist is dealing with a rather limited area that is somehow less human than other ways of life. What matters is that since, in William Posters, Sillitoe took to presenting the London middle-class scene, his touch has become fatally uncertain; whole tracts of his novels have been sketchy or forced; and he has resorted to literary modes which he cannot master.

A Start in Life is （yet again） about a man who breaks out of the hard-grafting life of the unskilled worker in the Midlands. The first seventy pages are （yet again） in the vein of the brutally breezy life-story told by the rogue male himself. But Sillitoe clearly signals his desire to break away from “regional” naturalism in the devices he resorts to. Narrative is interrupted for minor characters to tell their life-stories, in the manner of a Fielding novel: names are ludicrously fitting—Claudine Forks the husband-hungry Nottingham girl, Claud Moggerhanger the London racketeer, Bridgitte Appledore the rosy au pair girl from Holland, and Kundt the womanizing journalist from Sedenborg in Sweden … This kind of thing, along with the deliberately unlikely meetings and reencounters and getaways, prompts the publishers to credit Sillitoe with “reviving the picaresque.” He also “revives” Ian Fleming by bringing in a master criminal, who organizes big-time gold smuggling from inside an iron lung.

The result is inchoate. A thriller must be tightly plotted or it is nothing. A typical turning-point in A Start in Life is when the hero, quite implausibly, confides certain crucial details to a girl-friend. This might suit the deliberately cavalier linkings of picaresque, but here it jars horribly with a wholly different vein—the quite deep and subtle probings of psychological contrariness which Sillitoe is able to give the narrator when he is introspecting:

If I had taken the pains to see, which wouldn't have been all that far beyond me, to the deepest recesses behind his eyes in which that picture lurked in black and grey and red, of his wife's head tilted in the mud and staring at some innocent barge going by in the moonlight, I might have saved her, and him. But I didn't because somehow my feet were no longer plugged into the earth, and my aerial was withered in its contact with heaven. It seemed I had been living underwater not to have known the truth of what was so obvious … I saw everything clear and sharp with the bare eye, but a lazy idleness inside kept a permanent clothbound foot on the deeper perceptions that blinded me from action.

His best work of some years ago and the force which he still fitfully commands continue to give Sillitoe a claim on our attention. But there is a chance that his talent may fray itself out for good unless he now makes himself become less headlong in his output, perhaps by holding back from easy identification with the rogue male and by weighing up more thoughtfully what it is that he has against our present way of life.