Books: 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,...