Sillitoe's later work has often explored [the contradiction] of a developed, indignant, and compassionate social sense [combined] with a strong urge to push out into fantasy or even nightmare. The Storyteller faces the problem (if problem it can be called) head on….

Ernest Cotgrave discovers, one day in school, that he can divert the attentions of the school bully by spinning out a weird and wonderful tale about a mythical seafaring uncle…. The hero is the creator of other characters, one of whom is homicidally pursuing him on [a] ship; he is his own creation, also, acutely conscious that he wants to be things, not just tell them; and he is Sillitoe himself—except that Sillitoe, as super-ego narrator, is also the trim radio officer of the ship, with his mastery of the machinery for transmitting messages.

Sillitoe runs two risks in this elaborate allegory about the nature and motivation of the novelist as creator: that it should turn into no more than a series of individual good yarns, and that the whole venture should culminate in a high-speed and highflown symbolic climax. He takes on and overcomes the first danger triumphantly. The Storyteller sustains its pace and verve through a large variety of wild and gripping stories, as it needed to. Yet the nearer it moves towards its allegorical ambitions the more confusingly rhetorical it becomes. Worse, its narrative is finally tripped up and brought down by its own ingenuity, and the young Ernest telling tall tales about his Uncle George would never have allowed that to happen.