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    Saturday Night And Sunday Morning
    Saturday Night And Sunday Morning
    Saturday Night And Sunday Morning
    Audiobook (abridged)2 hours

    Saturday Night And Sunday Morning

    Written by Alan Sillitoe

    Narrated by Linus Roache

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Alan Sillitoe was an integral part of the Angry Young Men movement of the fifties that focused on its authentic depiction of real working class people. This book is true to their ideals in its raw sharp writing of the story of a young man framed by his brutal experience in the army and as a factory worker. Fuelled by a bleak aggressive outlook on life the book centres around a boozy, philandering weekend which is graphically captured by Sillitoe’s clever prose and Linus Roache’s strong reading.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Copyright Group
    Release dateJan 1, 2014
    ISBN9781780001494
    Saturday Night And Sunday Morning
    Author

    Alan Sillitoe

    Alan Sillitoe was born in 1928 and left school at 14 to work in various factories. He began writing after four years in the RAF, and lived for six years in France and Spain. His first stories were printed in the ‘Nottingham Weekly Guardian’. In 1958 ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ was published and ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’, which won the Hawthornden prize for Literature, came out the following year. Both these books were made into films.

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    Reviews for Saturday Night And Sunday Morning

    4/5

    210 ratings9 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This is sort of the British equivalent of the depressing Irish novels. I like those Irish books better. Obviously somewhat biographical this short novel takes a couple of years in the life of young 21yo Arthur Seaton. The majority of the book contains Part 1 Saturday Night and tells of Arthur's life as a man about the neighbourhood. He works in a bicycle factory; is good at his job and gets paid well, spending his money on classy clothes. He's a drunk and a ladies man. Most of the action takes place on Saturday nights when he goes pubbing, gets blindingly drunk, has affairs with married women, gets beat up by their husbands and gets into general mischief in the "yard" where he lives being a prankster and having a temper for revenge. Part 2: Sunday Night has Arthur realising at 24yo that carefree days are over, he's working on marrying a woman a few years younger than himself and coming to terms with routines of life when settling down. I felt a certain charm for the book as it reminds me of my heritage, with my father growing up in the same era not far away and hearing war stories from my Gran. None of the characters are likeable as they have internal moral codes they make up as they go along, but family is always strong. A small redeeming factor about the characters. This is a slow read as it plods along with certain episodes happening now and then but there is no real plot, action or climax. Just a slice of life in a 1950s council tenement street full of working class people. Not a thrilling story though I do find a bit of allure from it and will read the author again.
    • 4/5
      Reason Read: August 2022 botm, Reading 1001.This is a post war book (50-60s) of a young British man who is a single, working class male who enjoys making money at his lathe and drinking and carousing the pubs with married women. This offers little to make him endearing but he does like to fish and seems to love his family so I guess he's not all bad. This is the author's debut novel and it won the Author's Club First Novel Award. It was also made into a film. The title gives the structure of the book; the first part is Saturday night (the introduction to Arthur) and the second part Sunday Morning; the shorter part brings Arthur to a more settled mature chapter in his life as he quits running from commitment which he compares to being caught like a fish on a hook.Quotes;"...both became sad, as if they had taken on a happiness that could not be sustained.""...whatever people think I am or say I am, that’s what I’m not,""Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can’t help being one. You can’t deny that. And it’s best to be a rebel so as to show ’em it don’t pay to try to do you down. Factories and labour exchanges and insurance offices keep us alive and kicking—so they say—but they’re booby-traps and will suck you under like sinking-sands if you aren’t careful. Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income-tax offices milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death.""Mostly you were like a fish: you swam about with freedom, thinking how good it was to be left alone, doing anything you wanted to do and caring about no one, when suddenly: SPLUTCH! the big hook clapped itself into your mouth and you were caught."The author was called one of the "angry young men" which he didn't like. He definitely is a 50 60s guy. And maybe angry is a good description. It is a post war novel. Men and some women are working and making money and buying TVs. That's what you did in the 50s -- bought a car, bought a TV.
    • 4/5
      “If you went through life refusing all the bait dangled in front of you, that would be no life at all. No changes would be made and you would have nothing to fight against. Life would be dull as ditchwater.” This is Alan Sillitoe's first book and probably the most well known. Written in 1958 against the backdrop of the Cold War it tells the tale of the mundane nature of working-class life in a Northern English town, Nottingham, and features an anti-hero Arthur Seaton. Arthur works in a bicycle factory doing back breaking piecework at a lathe Monday to Friday. He is 22,still lives at home,earns a decent wage and looks forward to the weekend when he goes binge drinking(no its not a new phenomenon surprise surprise) and having affairs with two married sisters. He is a well drawn character and despite being described by his own brother Fred as 'not a very nice bloke' you still end up rooting for him right to the very end. Arthur is constantly fighting against authority whether that be father,foreman, the Police and the Army but is not so daft to realise that ultimately cannot win. By having affairs with married women his is also battling against the perceived norms of courtship and hence ultimately marriage until he is beaten up by the soldier husband of one of his conquests. Yet he also enjoys fishing suggesting he is also able to appreciate the quieter elements of life.Despite this being set at the end of the 1950's, when youth was coming to the fore after WWII with new suits hung in the bedroom ready to wear at the weekend, Arthur is in many respects just like his father and grandfather before him. Thus this becomes a comment on the class system within Britain, Arthur seems reasonably smart yet has only received a rudimentary education and is stuck in a monotonous job with seemingly little chance of advancement.The prose is beautifully written with occasional streams of colloquialisms mainly from Arthur giving it a real authentic feel but despite giving his initials to his hero and after having himself worked in a factory the author has also insisted this was not autobiographical. Writers like Dickens have written about the realities of working class life in Britain but this marked the start of a new age of literary realism and should be more widely read.
    • 3/5
      There's a guy, he's pretty self centred, has a good job as a piece worker, that allows him to have both money and some time for himself. He's attracted two women, and has a possible girlfriend on the side. It all comes apart and he has to reconstruct his life. It gives a wonderful impression of how working class life could be in England, in the 60's. It's very well written, and should be read by everyone. Copyright in 1958, it was a hit, and an eye-opener for the middle class world.
    • 4/5
      1958. Working class shlub works in the Raleigh bicycle factory in Nottingham tooling bike parts on a lathe. All he wants is his money to go out to pubs, buy nice clothes (Teddy suits?) and sleep with women. He's violent and crude. He hates the union, the bosses, the army, the government, taxes, cops and anyone else who gets in his way.Sillitoe makes him human by talking about his childhood poverty before the war. Hearing the air raid sirens, his whole family would have to climb into the bomb shelter and wait for the bombs to land. After this upbringing, he's basically happy to have food on the table and enough money for beer. At the beginning of the book he's sleeping with married women and hiding from their husbands. He doesn't want to get married. But towards the end the idea of having a woman in his bed every night, and not having to hide from or fight their husbands starts to appeal to him.It was a testament to Sillitoe's beautiful writing that I made it through this book at all. I want to dislike it, but I can't because it makes the whole class mentality understandable. It's that gritty realism. It doesn't glorify violence, or affairs, or factory work, it makes them seem quite squalid really, but human.I wanted him to leave Nottingham, get a wider perspective on life and maybe strive for something better. It's hard for me to accept that this is what this character's whole life may be. I have to look to Sillitoe himself to see that he did escape from these circumstances and survive to write many books, this one of which was really great.It could almost be called 'How poor Republicans are made.'
    • 5/5
      Most English novels are written in an incredibly dry manner (and, hey, I'm English too). SN&SM really excels with the excellent way Sillitoe writes. It's an evocative style without ever being heavy handed like so many turgid, naturalistic novels. It makes for a wonderfully easy read that the author paces extremely well too. It's true that Arthur is in many ways a not too sympathetic character, but Sillitoe injects him with enough wit to, somehow, make him seem a loveable rogue who you want to avoid any nasty comeuppance. Perhaps the most surprising thing was how relevant the novel still feels today. Much of the behaviour (for better and worse) and the attitudes held still seem like ones you wouldn't have to travel far in England to come across. Good writing in a setting that still feels relevant today - you can't ask for much more than that. A real great read.
    • 5/5
      This book, along with John Osborne's play Look Back In Anger, really represents the Angry Young Man movement from Britain's late 50's. Even with it's misogynist traits leftover from the previous generations, The Angry Young Man was a new breed who refused to follow orders if they didn't suit his mood and he lashed out at anyone who tried to civilize him. Today, we would call this person an a-hole, but 50 years ago it was individuality.Saturday Night...is such a well-written book and still holds surprises for the modern reader. Yes, Arthur is a pint-swilling troublemaker who not only gets married Brenda into "trouble", but sneaks around with her sister when Brenda is too busy to see him. He gets into drunken brawls and lies to just about everyone. He also takes pride in his work and loves his family. Sillitoe writes a complex character who vents, apologizes, looks forward to his future but is frightened of it too.
    • 4/5
      Excellent. Working class Englishman shows the proper take on class, work, govt., sex and freedom.
    • 5/5
      The greatest 20th Century novel of the English working class. Well, that's what I think, I was born a few miles away from Arthur Seaton's Nottingham home, my mother was born and lived in the council estate where Doreen lived and I know these people, they're aunts and uncles and in-laws. Not that Arthur thinks of himself as working class, and no more do I, this book is an antidote to all those smug affluent people who glorify and sentimentalise the working class, most of us who grew up in that world had loyalty only too our friends and the hell with everyone else, boss, manager and union boss, all trying to grind you down. Of course Arthur looks doomed to knuckle under, for all his bravado he sees no other life but the one he was born into.I pulled this book off the shelf to re-read, as Alan Sillitoe wrote a sequel in 2001, Birthdays, which I've just got round to ordering.