Book review: The Times, 3rd March 2007
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner - Flamingo.
Still seething, still boiling over with energy and indignation. Almost 50 years after it was first published, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner remains a forceful work.
Sillitoe had reason to be one of the original 'angry young men'. His childhood was spent in a cramped terraced house in Nottingham with a long-term unemployed father. ''We lived in a room whose four walls smelled of leaking gas, stale fat and layers of mouldering wall-paper,'' he told one interviewer. He had written for almost a decade and suffered rejection and indifference until his break-through work, Saturday Night, and Sunday Morning was finally published in 1958.
This skein of anger informed The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner which was written at a similar time. He made Coin Smith, the novella's anti-hero (later superbly played by Tom Courtenay in the film version), a cauldron of restlessness and resentment. His hostile tongue is set from the first page when he announces: 'Cunning is what counts in this life.' He is clear, always, that life is 'us' and 'them' with no bridge between.
The 'them' is the staff at Ruxton Towers, the borstal where Smith is sent for breaking into a bakery, but it could easily be the police, the school, the state - what ever stands in his way. Sillitoe cleverly allows his poetry to still reach for the sky. He writes of 'phlegmy bits of sunlight' and Smith smelling 'green grass and honeysuckle' as he embarks on another early morning run. The borstal governor, meanwhile, is a 'half-dead gangrened gaffer.' The book frames the finest angry prose of its generation.