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way of living and thinking: the rhythms of constraint and release,
the tension between his appetite for taking the world as it came
and his lust for kicking it apart, all within the larger development
of the process by which he comes to be hobbled to his ordinary
station
in
life. What made Arthur Seaton memorable and what
placed Sillitoe on his first try in the company of Dickens and
Lawrence, was the depth of specification with which he detailed
the deep-dyed nihilism of the English working class. In
The Gen–
eral
there is little of this solidity or authority of treatment; instead
Sillitoe forces his imagination out of the social here and now to
portray
in
a very vague wayan episode in a future global war be–
tween the West and the East.
The best writing is in the beginning. A train is carrying a
symphony orchestra on an improbable mission to entertain the
Western soldiers at the front. Moving across the freshly scarred
face of Central Europe, it abruptly enters the scene of a major
battle and, seemingly out of control, continues to speed crazily on
amid exploding shells and machine gun fire, before it is finally
brought to a halt and captured by a group of barbaric-looking
"Gorsheks"-the name for the enemy. This whole opening section
with its various absurdities calmly linked one to the other as they
pass through the lucid mind of the orchestra conductor, is both
fantastic and convincing: the idea of a symphony orchestra car–
ried madly through the midst of a battle seems sufficiently night–
marish to introduce a story about the next war. However, for the
rest of the book, this war is described with all of the probable as–
pects of its horror completely left out. Though the Gorsheks have
perfected their machine-ridden society to the extent that special
computers do their thinking for them, they-like the West-are
otherwise fighting with a minimum of military technology. As a
result, the massive land engagement which has been going on for
four years on a very narrow front, the reliance upon infantry and
artillery and skillful tactics-all make this global war between the
West and the East seem rather like World War I.
Against this insubstantial and implausible background, the
issues of the coming war are posed by the situation of the Gorshek
General who receives orders to kill the musicians immediately. The
Gorsheks take no prisoners; it is part of the remorseless logic with
