The author is brilliant. He takes a character that is generally very easy to dislike. But he makes the narration so good that you really need to know what is going to happen next.



Our Michael is a bastard. In every sense of the word. He has a mum who seems to entertain every soldier around in Nottingham. Michael then proceeds to get his girlfriend pregnant and then decamp to London to see whether the pavements are really paved in gold to make his fortune there.



Going from London across the channel, from dealing with rough and dangerous characters Michael seems to have a good time. He enjoys it all.



The narrator is a nasty piece of work, who does not shy away from the fact that he is. This was part of the attraction!



Sent to me by Netgalley for an unbiased review, courtesy of Open Road Integrated Media, I am only sorry that it took me so long to get to this quirky book!

Goodreads and Amazon reviews up on 8/1/2017. Review on my blog 10/1/2017

I've enjoyed other Sillitoe books and I recognized much of his genius. The working class narrator, the rough and tumble plot, and an added expanded cast of characters. What I didn't expect was the length of time I was to spend in the head of an angry young man.

Rueful, Thoughtful, Antic, Confessional, and High-spirited Sillitoe.........

I like my angry young men more on the playful and ironic end of the scale, which is why I prefer J.P. Donleavy, (who just barely qualifies as angry), to John Osborne. But for sheer impact and clarity I'll never quite get Sillitoe's "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" out of my mind. So, the Michael Cullen books, and especially this first volume, have an honored place somewhere at the point at which all of these influences converge.

Angry? Sure. Kitchen sink? Suds up to your elbows. Ironic, bemused and sometimes downright funny in a Donleavy sort of way? You bet. This is a milder, more rueful, more thoughtful and confessional and forgiving Sillitoe, and so it strikes all of the right chords. Cullen is just smart enough, just dumb enough, just simple enough, and just complex enough to capture his time, his society, and his circumstances.

Is this tale, first published in 1970, dated? Oh my. The sometimes childish and sometimes macho hero, and his women, speak to us from an almost prehistoric time, (although it occurs to me that I'm only three years younger than Cullen would be and so must have come up at the same time he did. Oh, yes, I sort of remember that now.) But, even as here or there you cringe a bit, (as we all do when contemplating youthful indiscretions), there is still a great deal of truth and power in the Cullen story.

But angry young men and the like aside, this book is so well crafted and so direct, honest, devious and puckish, that it will entertain the reader. Sillitoe's craft is subtle; imagine how hard it was to create a voice as convincing and confiding and direct as Cullen's. It's good to see that this book is back and readily available.

(Please note that I received a free ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)