Books: Scorched Souls

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A TREE ON FIRE by Alan Sillitoe. 451 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

As one of the angriest of Britain's Angry Young Men, Alan Sillitoe made painfully vivid the mill-town world of chapped hands and cold-water sinks in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. In this novel, he seems neither quite so young and angry, nor quite so British.

Frank Dawley, a young ex-factory worker, has deserted his wife and his pregnant mistress to fight for the F.L.N. against the French in Algeria. His journey turns into what might be called an existential Pilgrim's Progress. Is he simply trying to escape the ties of his former life, or is he really bent on revolutionizing the world by fighting for Communism and the Algerians? The relentless sun becomes a more formidable combatant than the French, the endless sand a more unarguable reality than any dialectic.

Surrounded by scorpions and fleas, sandstorms and the fire bombings from French helicopters, Dawley soon feels that his past is irretrievable and his future improbable. "They ambled like dead men, seeking refuge from the stony midday sun, no longer knowing that they walked. Land was like alcohol; he walked, and walking was like drinking. He drank it in on waking, and went all day from sundown to blackout wallowing in it until he dropped from exhaustion and total inebriation, happy and not caring if he ever woke again. Trudging all day over the flat stale beer of the stony plain, brandy of hills, mouth shut tight because it seeped in continually through eyes, ears, nose and anus, the drink of land and the never-ending gutterbout of topography, a blinding weekend of landbooze that went on for months."

In the other half of the book, Albert Handley—a middle-aged madcap painter presiding over a whole circus of a family in Lincolnshire—rages against the sudden wealth and new-found fame threatening his old bohemian way of life. His children pester him for money, journalists hound him for interviews. Visions of unborn paintings torment his days and nights. He, too, claims to be a revolutionary—making money so that he can tear down the social structure that feeds him.

The author attempts a parallel but fails to sustain it. But Sillitoe is himself obviously more at home in Algeria and its stark alternatives than in the equivocal uncertainties of the sybaritic world of his Lincolnshire artist.