Man in the middle
- This is a preview of the essay.
To view the full text you must login!
This story was printed from LookSmart's FindArticles where you can search and read 3.5 million articles from over 700 publications.
http://www.findarticles.com
Alligator Playground. (book reviews)
New Statesman, Jan 30, 1998, by James Urquhart
Alan Sillitoe Flamingo, 6.99 [pounds sterling]
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 hardbitten, 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...