Alan Sillitoe’s short stories in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runnerdistill a nasty truth about what it takes to survive life when the journey starts with a leaky dinghy and the only tool offered is half an oar. His characters, borne out of the British working class, are survivors getting by on skills of alienation, disconnection, and resignation. There is no upward mobility for this underclass, there is only a kind of low-grade and constant warfare against the self, and an unmitigated disdain for what is unreachable.  The disdain is even at times militant but it is also a shield against any tender buds of longing that might try to take root in this most unfertile of soils, the slums of industrial towns.

In the title story, a young boy sent to a Borstal (reform school with sentenced inmates) is given the opportunity to train for a long distance championship meet, an opportunity that excuses him from some of the worst work assignments of the Borstal and allows him the freedom to run alone and unguarded through the countryside.  All the running gives him plenty of time to think: “as soon as I take that first flying leap out into the frosty grass of an early morning when even birds haven’t the heart to whistle, I get to thinking and that’s what I like….It’s a treat being a long-distance runner, out in the world by yourself with not a soul to make you bad-tempered or tell you what to do or that there’s a shop to break and enter a bit back from the next street.  Sometimes I think that I’ve never been so free as during that couple of hours when I’m trotting up the path out of the gates and turning by that bare-faced, big-bellied oak tree at the lane end.”

What he thinks about while running is his past (the death of his father and the temporary windfall his death provided to the family — “I’d never known a family as happy as ours was in that couple of months when we’d got all the money we needed” — and the robbery  that landed him in the Borstal), and his future. He knows what lays in store for him — more petty crime, some good times and some bad, and then death. The goals that the governor of the Borstal lays out for him are dreams he knows are false, goals unattainable for the likes of him.  The governor hasn’t a clue: “he’s stupid and I’m not, because I can see further into the likes of him than he can see into the likes of me.“  What the runner knows, and the Governor denies, is that his life was set from the moment of his birth into a family with a drinking dad, a whoring mom, and kids spilling out all over: “I knew what the loneliness of the long distance runner running across the country felt like, realizing that as far as I was concerned this feeling was the only honesty and realness there was in the world and I knowing it would be no different ever, no matter what I felt at odd times, and no matter what anybody else tried to tell me.“  He’ll train for the race and he could win but he won’t, because to win would be to give in to the false assertions of the Governor and those like him, that there is a future for the boys of the Borstal: “I’ll show him what honesty means if its the last thing I do, though I’m sure he’ll never understand because if he and all them like him did [understand], it’d mean they’d be on my side which is impossible.”

All of Sillitoe’s stories are written with prose that is crackling and pulsing, conveying the  live wire that runs through even the most dead-end of existences.  His characters may not have a future but they do live with great power, feeding on the immutable force field that is the human spirit to survive.  It is this spirit that keeps the book from being a depressing tome of despair and makes it instead a testament to life.  Sillitoe’s characters have had nothing handed to them, they are not taking any bull from anybody, and they know only one thing for sure: they are from where they are from, and it is a place they will not relinquish for anything.  They are surviving and getting on and getting by.