The Broken Chariot

by Alan Sillitoe

A superb creation of love, life and class in the post-war world. When Herbert Thurgarton-Strang was seven, his parents took him away from India and left him in a boarding school in England which had everything to recommend it except pity. Through the stifling, alarming years which follow, Herbert is held together by the notion of revenge on those loving parents, and by the knowledge that, over there, a new world beckons. And when he's seventeen, he steals away from school, steals away from Herbert, becomes a different boy; becomes, in Nottingham, Bert the lathe-worker, Bert the womaniser, Bert the soldier, Bert the sometime bruiser. Plunged into the louche life, he bobs like a cork, but eventually Bert/Herbert does lay his demons to rest.

Genres: Fiction

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1998

About the author

Alan Sillitoe was an English writer, one of the "Angry Young Men" of the 1950s (although he, in common with most of the other writers to whom the label was applied, had never welcomed it).
For more see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Sil...

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sillitoe is one of the great underrated British novelists of the Twentieth Century. He seems to have fallen out of vogue somewhat but did make a splash with "the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" and "Saturday Night, Sunday Morning." Though I don't really know a great deal about British working class culture - other than what I can glean from some television shows and some records by middle class dudes who ended up in the Clash and so forth (via art school), there's something that seems to ring true about Sillitoe's protagonists. Like, they drink just like the British. And fight just like the British. And shag just like the British. Anyone who's an anglophile when it comes to tunes would probably dig this author. Sort of a Nelson Algren of England. I thought very top notch prose from this guy.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I find that Sillitoe books written in his later life are strange ones - on the one hand it seems he’s lost the edge of early works like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, but on the other he still wrote scathing descriptions of post-war life for the working-class. I think it’s the narrative that suffers more than anything, here the protagonist is somehow ambling through life; a middle-class man who transforms himself into a working-class Nottingham factory worker, in a similar vein to how Nell Dunne’s character Polly in Up the Junction slums it, and as Jarvis Cocker proclaims, “if you call your dad he could stop it all” - the conflict between the two sides of Bert/Herbert being the focus here.
It was alright, I just didn’t love it the way way I loved his other later offering The Open Door.

[Thekirkiepirate · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of Sillitoe's later novels, this has the unlikely plot of a boy running away from private school to make a life for himself working in a Nottingham factory, before becoming a successful novelist. Although an unlikely plot, it does allow him to work a number of classical references into the narrative, as well as giving an easy illustration of class in Britain in the immediate post-war years.

As always, he produces a considered novel, albeit one that would probably have had more impact had it been published in the time of its setting. However, he does paint an accurate picture of a privileged lifestyle compared to the difficult conditions that working people had to live and work in at that time, before contrasting this with the middle class artistic lifestyle in London at a time moving towards the cultural change of the 1960's

[Alejandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was not entirely sure about this one for the first few dozen pages, then the narrative enveloped me and by two thirds of the way into it I did not want it to finish. Pretty different to any other novel, the main character being so unsympathetic, and yet, engaging.