Although well-received in some quarters (“Sillitoe scores a hat trick” – Punch), The General confounded many people. Highly anticipated after the one-two of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, here was a curious fable, miles removed from the back-streets of Nottingham, its twin protagonists the titular military type and a standoffish orchestra conductor who ends up as his prisoner. A fable, moreover, that occurs in a fictitious country, during a period of time that’s deliberately out of time, and loaded with philosophically charged and decidedly non-naturalistic dialogue.
It was kind of like Shane Meadows following up Small Time and TwentyFourSeven with Ivan’s Childhood.
The General started life as a short story, ‘The General’s Dilemma’, but it kept growing and growing, and gradually inched towards novel length. After Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was accepted for publication, Sillitoe intended The General as his follow-up and it’s alarming to think the impact it might have had on his career: his debut could easily have been dismissed as a one-off, his readership deserting him. As it was, he was still tinkering and making revisions so he bundled up some short stories along with a novella about a rebellious Borstal lad and submitted them as, for all intents and purposes, a makeshift second volume.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner immediately consolidated his status as an exciting new literary talent, a reputation that allowed his career to weather the blip of The General, just as it would weather a couple of his more challenging and experimental outings – The Storyteller and Travels in Nihilon spring to mind – later on.
“Go back to Nottingham, Mr Sillitoe” one critic instructed, his expectations obviously shot to pieces by The General’s symbolism, cerebral musings on the place of art in times of war, and wholesale absence of pubs, factories and Nottingham backstreets. Sillitoe would indeed go back to Nottingham – in its early chapters, anyway – with Key to the Door, an epic that would take its protagonist to Malaya during National Service and an awakening of class consciousness.
The class divide – us and them, workers vs assorted bastards, be they bosses, police or toffs – is what most of us think of when we think of Alan Sillitoe and it’s easy to see why The General left readers perplexed since issues of class do not feature at all. Indeed, the novel resists specificity to an almost frustrating degree. An author’s note that “East and West in this novel bear no relation to the east and west of modern times”, suggests a work of historical fiction, but there are little or no details by which an era can be pinpointed, although the appearance of a steam train hauling passengers in Chapter 1 rules out any time earlier than 1825. And even that locomotive and its rake of carriages emerge as something impressionistic:
The train was carried slowly through the night on rhythmically beating pistons, its centipede-brown belly sending the same morse-code symbol for hour after hour into black woods or arable rolling plain … A lighter rattle was a bridge being crossed, and out of the window a broad river curled away under the moon.
Morse code was developed in the 1830s and 1840s, which doesn’t give us much more information on the novel’s timeline than the train does. The clue, I suspect, is that loaded word “symbol” in the opening sentence. The General deals heavily in symbolism. And even more so in allegory. The country in which the story takes place is never named, the General himself remains anonymous beyond his rank, the army he commands are only ever referred to as “the Gorsheks”, and the members of the orchestra who become his prisoners have names like Evart, Starnberg and Armgardson – suggesting some shared European (possibly East European) heritage, but remaining wilfully elusive.
The story itself is pure simplicity: the General puts the orchestra into captivity after their special train finds itself behind the lines. High Command order him to execute them. The General doesn’t want to, and they barter a stay of execution with an impromptu concert. Yet Sillitoe never seems to milk the inherent tension, instead structuring the novel as a philosophical enquiry into various states of mind, most prominently those of the General and Evart, the conductor.
As a result, characters fling entire pages of cerebral dialogue at each other. Sillitoe’s admittedly excellent descriptive writing slows down every moment of the orchestra’s potential death sentence; in some scenes, The General seems to be a precursor of Ian McEwan’s precise and formalist style, wherein every moment is considered intrinsically. In others, it presupposes Iain Banks’s A Song of Stone in its quixotic and melancholy approach to its subject matter.
The General is about many things – art predominantly, but also conflict, landscape, and the vacillations of one’s moral compass in compromising circumstances – but it never arrives at a locus where all of these strands are pulled together and the novel shucks off its philosophical noodlings in favour of a Big Artistic Statement. Director Ralph Nelson’s 1967 film version, Counterpoint, ditches the ambiguity, explicitly sites the narrative in World War II and makes the conflict thuddingly obvious. Despite some entertaining scenery chewing courtesy of Charlton Heston and Maximillian Schell – as, respectively, the conductor and the General – it’s a stodgy piece of work that does nothing to illuminate the hidden depths of Sillitoe’s novel.
The General demands its readers do some work. A puzzle-box of a novel where nuance vaunts narrative, symbolism stymies drama, and intellectual enquiry asks you to supply your own side of the discussion, it’s a studiedly difficult piece of work (Sillitoe seems to be channelling his inner Faulkner in some passages) that calls for multiple readings. I tend to reapproach it each decade. It’s a book you need to live with for a while. It rewards you by getting under your skin.
Neil Fulwood
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