Anatomy of a Radical

KEY TO THE DOOR (439 pp.)--Alan S/7///oe--Knopf ($5.95).

Of all the Angries who have cut their literary teeth in Britain's welfare state, perhaps the angriest is a onetime Nottingham slum kid named Alan Sillitoe, 34.

The characters in his prizewinning, best-selling first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, see life in terms of We and They. We are the little blokes what are shoved around; They are the bloody bastards what does the shovin'--an' the 'ell with 'em. In his new novel, Sillitoe broadens and deepens his anger to include Their war.

Moonlight Flit. Brian Seaton is the elder brother of Saturday Night's hero, Arthur, growing up in industrial Nottingham in the '30s and on the dole.

Perennially jobless Dad, without a tanner for a smoke, rages at hunger and helplessness, beats up nagging Mam, or stares at the wall. When the back rent piles up, it comes time for a "moonlight flit"--the household goods piled on a barrow and trundled at midnight to a vacant tenement in another slum.

Brian painfully learns to lie. fight, and tomcat. He finds a steady girl, marries her with a baby on the way. And when he is old enough to be drafted (after World War II), he puts in for overseas duty and is shipped out to Malaya.

Flex the Muscles. East of Suez, Brian finds that the best is indeed like the worst; it is the same old We-They world, with the disconcerting difference that he is now a They, while the Communist peasants he is fighting seem to him to be little blokes. In a brilliantly described jungle patrol, Brian, alone, is attacked by one of them. He manages to disarm him.

But then all the conditioning of military training and Mother England falls before the conditioning of Nottingham and Dad and the dole. He lets the peasant go.

Brian is astonished and elated by his action. " 'What did you do in the war. Dad?' " he imagines them asking at home. " 'I caught a Communist and let him go.' 'What did you do that for, then?' 'Because he was a man.' And not everybody will look at me gone-out. 'Brian, my lad, I'm proud o' you,' the old man would say." Later, in an ambush that looks for a while like the finish, Brian deliberately aims his gun so as to avoid hitting the enemy. At the end of his hitch, he ships back to England, musing that he has found "the key to the door . . . And with the key to the door, all you need do now . . . was flex your laboring muscles to open it."

Key to the Door is as unplotted as living. Only the sparkling sharpness of the author's ear and eye keeps the action in this long book from bogging to the axles in minutiae. Sillitoe writes with authority, but he thinks with the same sentimental confusion between personal and collective ethics that is the trademark of Britain's new radicals, the unilateral disarmers.

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