Out on a Limbo

By Otto Friedrich

A START IN LIFE by Alan Sillitoe. 352 pages. Scribners. $6.95.

Thirteen years have passed since Alan Sillitoe burst forth, in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, as one of the angriest of Britain's Angry Young Men. If he is still angry, it may be because of his relative lack of progress in more man a decade of hard work. In all he has produced six novels, three collections of short stories, three volumes of poetry, a travelogue on Russia, a play and a children's tale, but the reviews have generally been halfhearted.

This is a pity, for Sillitoe is a writer of considerable talent: an ingenious storyteller, a stylist and, best of all, a genuinely rebellious spirit. Now, with a bow to Defoe and Fielding, he offers a cheerful picaresque novel subtitled "the ordinary and not so ordinary adventures of a bastard and a proletarian . . . when the star of his destiny takes him to London and sundry places . . ."

The hero is a young rascal named Michael Cullen, who lies and steals as a matter of course. Still, he also manages to suggest that these are merely tactics of self-defense in a world ruled by criminals far worse than he. For example: Claud Moggerhanger, a vice lord who employs Michael as his chauffeur, and Jack Leningrad, who recruits Michael to the gold-smuggling ring that he operates from inside his iron lung. Of him Moggerhanger remarks, "I'll smash his lung to pieces and watch him die like a fish on his own floor."

Crooked Dog Race. It is a sinister world, but less sinister than ridiculous. At one point, the hero stumbles through Stonehenge in a torrential downpour pursuing a brace of runaway greyhounds that Moggerhanger has just entered in a crooked dog race. Later he finds himself both proposing marriage and consummating it with Moggerhanger's daughter in the lavatory of an airliner high over France. As for that iron lung, it turns out to be fake.

Such raucous doings deserve something more than the limbo of faint praise. But Sillitoe is still paying the penalty for achieving his first literary triumph as part of a group that has outlived its time. His fate is a little like being known as a former member of the Andrews Sisters or the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. Even if Sillitoe lives to be 100, his obituary will no doubt say: "Once known as one of Britain's Angry Young Men." Even at his present 43, he merits more than that.

.Otto Friedrich

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