One of the Greatest English Novels of the Past 50 Years - Rated 
Alan Sillitoe is the voice of England's aspiring working class - and A Man of His Time proves it once again. This isn't just a good book; it's a great book. Born in 1866, Ernest Burton is a man of iron as well as a man of his time. He takes a justly earned pride in his trade as blacksmith and his manhood too: 'I don't take tips, and only touch my cap to a personable woman.' Indeed, he pulls women with as much skill and confidence as he shapes iron. The book's first seduction takes place in a railway carriage with a young widow Burton has just met - 'carmine features contrasting with the black of mourning as she held out her arms.' Sillitoe paints the mystery of desire with honesty and power. If fellow Nottinghamshire writer D.H. Lawrence were still alive, he could learn some lessons from Mr. Sillitoe.
The geography of the novel is confined to a small corner of Nottinghamshire, but the characters are not spared the effects of profound social change. Burton's oldest son dies in the First World War, not from a German bullet, but from the kick of a mad horse. The power of Sillitoe's prose - 'A building on legs, of sheer muscle and flesh coming down...a hoof as big as an anvil splayed wide with lightning suddenness on an unforeseen trajectory, unthinking tons of angry flesh behind.' - has not diminished, but been enhanced by passing decades.
Burton, even his children call him that, is a complex character who is not always likeable - as when he hits his wife or commits adultery with his son's fiancée - but, unlike many other 'men of his time', he is capable of remorse, reflection and change. 'He immediately knew he had done wrong, shouldn't have given even the first, because she was his wife and not a child or animal to be kept in order.' At the end of the book Burton has softened into a much-loved grandfather and husband. As Luftwaffe bombs pour down near their home, there is a moment of great tenderness between the elderly couple: 'You kissed me, Ernest.'
Ernest Burton is one of the most important characters to emerge from the last fifty years of English fiction. He represents, almost like a human oak tree, the pith and heart of central England. Burton could have been one of Chaucer's pilgrims - and would certainly have put smiles on the faces of the Wife of Bath and that Prioress. There is something larger than life about Burton as he rings a bull - a job that requires putting a red-hot poker through a bull's nostril - or cycles home after losing an eye while shoeing pit ponies. He is, of course, too much 'a man of his time' to claim compensation or even visit a doctor.
Burton dies at the age 80, an impressive innings for his class and generation. As always he is fearless: '...he saw with a blacksmith's clarity Old Nick coming towards him on a horse...Never afraid of the dark, he went into it wondering what was there.' Fifty years later, three grandsons - including the irrepressible Arthur Seaton of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - gather at Burton's grave for a boozy commemoration of a great life. Arthur is wearing a 'Rohan garment from a car-boot sale.' Sillitoe's irony is subtle and telling. Burton would never have dressed like that - he was far too much the cock-of-the-walk.
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