[In the following mixed review, Urquhart comments on strengths and weaknesses of the stories in Alligator Playground.]

Not much is left of Sillitoe's working Nottingham. The John Player tobacco factory has shut down, machine industries have relocated, pits have closed. But the social landscape holds some resonance of close-knit terraces and hard corner pubs fugged with beer fumes and noise; of large families with boorish, emotionally brutal men and their hard-bitten, enduring wives.

Sillitoe wrote of blue-collar Nottingham in his first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning （1958）; and his first short story collection, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, had the same undertow of violence and illicit behaviour. The runner, a Borstal boy, provided a manifesto for the author: honesty isn't about lawfulness, but about being true to your origins. Publishers at first rejected Saturday Night but Sillitoe continued to write of “ordinary people as I knew them” and, if this made him unpublishable, “then so be it.”

In its perverse way, nothing could prove the rightness of his stubborn defence of honest writing better than “Alligator Playground,” the insubstantial novella that opens his latest collection. The plot involves thirtysomethings flopping limply at each other on the mudflats of London's literary crowd. A philandering publisher, Tom, works through wives and any bit of available skirt, before bedding a previously strident lesbian. Jo immediately renounces her Sapphic career, moves in with misogynistic Tom and bang! they have kids.

It's difficult to see Sillitoe's purpose with this cod bed-hopper. Any attempt at satire of promiscuous, self-important haste fails, since we care for neither the bland melodrama nor the glass-eyed caricatures trawled from London's fashionable waters. The author has, by pressing four marriages, three divorces and two deaths into less than 90 pages, sacrificed emotional gravity to action. The result has the circularity of a morality tale but lacks any sense of empathy or moral structure.

Happily the other eight tales restore faith. Sillitoe's great strength—teasing out the frail niceties of relationships—ensures that slender accounts of love and loss are washed with a poignancy that rarely encroaches on the sentimental. His capacity is wide—“Ron Delph and His Fight with King Arthur” touchingly recounts the anxieties of adolescence; “A Matter of Teeth” satisfyingly proclaims the justness of double infidelities. But there's also an economy with motifs: the events in both “A Respectable Woman” and “Battlefields” occur while driving through France, and we discover three coy couples “going the whole way in the darkest part of the wood” in this collection alone.

Sillitoe never quite achieves the intricate family relationships found in William Trevor's short stories, or the explicit dysfunctions of A L Kennedy or Helen Simpson. Here he tries different timbres of character and class, but the only true chord in “Beggarland” is Greta, the sassy au pair from “up north.” It's as though Sillitoe isn't sufficiently interested in the urbane proprieties of her sniffy employers to make them interesting. Inevitably, perhaps, the strongest work reverts to familiar Nottingham terraces in “Call Me Sailor” and the autobiographical “Ivy.”

Alligator Playground implies animal predation and a degree of lazy violence that is never fully realised in this collection. Three-quarters of Sillitoe's first novel was Saturday night, rolling passion with pints and punches until Seaton was lamped out on the pub floor. Forty years on, Sillitoe's Sunday morning is all newspapers and cappuccino, but his middle classes are thirsting for more galvanising spirits.