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KEY TO THE DOOR by Alan Sillitoe. (W. H. Allen.)

THE OLD MEN AT THE ZOO by Angus Wilson. (Secker & Warburg.)

THE LAST EXILE by James Aldridge. (Hamish Hamilton.)

Key to the Door returns Alan Sillitoe to the grimy streets and back alleys of his native Nottingham and a lukewarm, not to say downright chilly, reception from those reviewers who apparently thought that his last novel, The General, had seen him done with all that working-class stuff. A proletarian background, it seems, may support one novel (with a book of short stories thrown in for good measure) but a second smacks of rank self-indulgence. A sharp rap of plebeian knuckles may prove a timely reminder that although the poverty and injustice of the thirties can provide a basis for the odd television documentary (eyes down for a few hushed words of reverence about those deserted Jarrow streets) it will not do for literature. That, we take it, is safe in the hands of Mr Waugh and Miss Murdoch.

     So where does this leave Sillitoe? To my mind, after reading this, certainly his longest and perhaps his most ambitious book, even more firmly established as oar most important, if not sole, working-class novelist. The enormously successful Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was set in the Nottingham of the affluent fifties. Its hero, the tough, hard-drinking Arthur Seaton earned good wages but remained cynical, unco-operative, resentful and suspicious of all authority. For many, his attitude must have seemed another example of Teddy-boy loutishness and irresponsibility. This second novel which amplifies and extends the same theme, should give a far greater understanding of the fear and mistrust that prompt such behaviour. Set for the most part in the Nottingham of the Depression — ’the dirty thirties’ — it conveys with tremendous power and certainty what it is like to be poor, to be exploited or unemployed, to be a slum-dweller for whom misery is not a temporary misfortune but a harsh, inescapable fact of existence. For the first time in English fiction, the lower depths of our society have been plumbed with the uncompromising exactness that speaks of actual experience and an awareness not only of the ‘broad social issues’ but the all-important minutia. (Five woodbines for a father on the dole that can make the difference between Heaven and Hell for the rest of the family.) Sillitoe is a working-class novelist by birth — plus his good fortune in not having been divorced from his environment by a higher education—and not by political affiliation or membership of some self-conscious ‘school’. In consequence, his work is as far removed from the dewy-eyed political histrionics of Wesker or the phoney ‘tough lyricism’ of Alun Owen as it is from the knockabout ‘Up-for-the-Cup’ comedy routines of twenty years back. These, I fancy, find their admirers in the ‘bottle of red wine and a hunk of bread and cheese’ section of the working-classes. Sillitoe’s appeal is wider and more important. Arthur Seaton stirred a response in the boys of the local secondary modern and the youths on the factory bench who read Saturday Night (or, more likely, saw the film) because they recognized in him something of themselves. (This is not to deny Arthur his robust individuality: we all reflect to some extent our background and this is no less true of the backstreets of our industrial cities than of the playing fields of Eton.) Here was a new hero of fiction, a figure who was not only working-class but, like themselves, permanently working-class, as distinct from the Joe Lamptons and Billy Liars whose struggles to escape their origins immediately made them different. This is the strength of Sillitoe, the ability to write, convincingly and revealingly, of labourers and machine-minders within the context of their own class. He has chronicled a stratum of society previously neglected in fiction and introduced us to people whom the average reader would, normally, only glimpse from the extra-penny-a-pint security of the saloon bar or read about in the criminal proceedings of the local paper.

     Key to the Door tells the story of Brian Seaton who is, as far as one can gather, Arthur’s elder brother. Brought up in the depressed atmosphere of the thirties, the truculence of his character is forged by the dole queues, moonlight-flits, the poverty-rooted, violent quarrels of his parents, and political allegiances which are as much a question of class as support of Notts County is a question of geography. The second half of the novel deals with his life as a National Serviceman stationed in Malaya. Here he has an affair with a Chinese dancing girl (inscrutably one dimensional) interspersed with some over-the-shoulder moral speculations about his child-wife at home. The Malayan War breaks out, and in a crucial scene in the jungle, he refuses to fire on some Communist guerillas whose battle he recognizes as an extension of his own.

     This is not a flawless novel by any means. The first half is little more than a kaleidoscopic succession of working-class scenes which, though they never strike a false note, lack any sense of organization or dramatic development. Noticeable too is an occasional straining for poetical effect and a tilt towards verbosity that can lead to wet clothes being described as ‘emitting invisible yet olfactory vapours’. But the overall impression (and how often this is ignored by reviewers as they feverishly root out literary peccadilloes) is powerful and honest. It may not enjoy the success of Saturday Night but it is the best novel I have read this year.

     After blindly groping my way through the incestuous, murky symbolism of A Severed Head, there seemed some justification for my bland assumption that modern fiction could hold no further qualms for me. The Old Men at the Zoo proved just how wrong I was. Angus Wilson is, at best, a wickedly precise writer who can up-end a posturing phoney before he has finished his second gin. At worst, however, as evidenced in some of his short stories, he reveals a preoccupation with the abnormal and the mentally sick that goes beyond the boundaries of valid art. These offend me not so much for their tastelessness as for the fact that what is described is so far out on the fringe of human experience and is so intensely private, it can have little meaning for the rest of us. I cannot for instance believe that reading of an adult mongal strangling herself in a frenzied nightmare can produce anything but pain without illumination. Unfortunately, it is the morbid that conquers in The Old Men at the Zoo and the result is a novel that makes Miss Murdoch’s effort seem downright prissy.

     The novel is set in 1970 when England stands in imminent danger of being attacked by a Federated Europe because of her refusal to join. The story, told by a young bureaucrat-cum-naturalist obsessed by his marital bed, centres on the London Zoo and the bickerings and intrigues of its odd assorted staff. The main conflict is between the Zoo’s director, founder of a grandiose scheme to set up a National Reserve on the Welsh border and his Number Two who wants to revive the Victorian Zoo. The director’s scheme is pushed ahead by the Zoo’s president, a political press lord, as part of a plan to cause an evacuation scare and return him to the Cabinet. When this is accomplished, he withdraws his support and Number Two is given his chance. He plans a mammoth gala opening which coincides with the outbreak of war. London is bombed and in the widespread starvation and rioting that follow, the Zoo is virtually destroyed.

     Much of this is trenchant, perceptive and amusing. The London Zoo with its wrangling, ambitious, fanatically myopic old men is used as an effective symbol of the venality, moral bankruptcy and corruption of our society. Wilson can still strip away false trappings to expose the miserable, stunted frame beneath, as in the excellent scenes here where he pierces the inflated hollowness of the grief bestowed on a young keeper tragically killed in the Zoo. Nor has he lost any of his old adroitness at creating characters who are both bizarre and convincing. Yet interwoven with all this, there is a great deal that is both repugnant and unnecessary to the theme of the book. There comes a moment when the most sincere investigation of man’s depravity recoils on itself. This, I think, has happened here. Lest it should seem I am being too finicky let me say that I bore the sickening death of a young keeper, kicked in the testicles by a sick giraffe, with an almost heartless insouciance. A nymphomaniac’s treacherous sexual assault on an innocent, badger-watching naturalist left me impassive. Indeed, it was only with the slow realization that this same nympho and her Alsatian were more than just good friends that I began to show signs of distress. Confirmation of this horrible fact after the dog had killed her, finally turned my stomach and, I confess, ruined my appetite for the violently emetic roasted badger served to the starving hero some little time before the neo-Fascists, in power temporarily after the war, began to hurl political prisoners to the beasts of the Zoo. Perhaps I’m just not up to this high living. Certainly, Rin-Tin-Tin will never be the same to me again.

     The Last Exile, a formidable book in length (790 pages), is of the genre that blends fiction with history. In this case it is the predicament of an Englishman working for the Egyptian Government at the time of the Suez crisis. Captain Scott, court-martialled while in the Eighth Army for disobeying a disastrous order and his career ruined, has settled in Egypt where he enjoys the friendship of Nasser whose life he once saved. The plot follows the mounting tension of his conflicting loyalties as the Anglo-French invasion draws nearer and his love affairs. I suppose that the real vindication of this sort of work as a novel is that the story should be so powerful and compelling in itself that the immense events occurring in the background only heighten and illuminate it. James Aldridge is only partially successful. The story is sometimes interesting, particularly in the scenes dealing with the Arabs. More often, however, it proves a distraction to the historical side of the book which struck me as remarkably well-informed, and impartial. For this alone, it is worth reading. Though it does leave a hundred perplexities behind as to just what is fiction and what is fact.