How Sillitoe upended British propriety

Following up on my reading of the story Isaac Starbuck, by Alan Sillitoe, I began reading his first (1960) novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - started with an old 50 cent Signet pb with one of those ridiculous salacious covers, a real collectible if it were in good shape, but the pages and binding literally started crumbling in my hands as I read so reverted to a library hardcover, not much better, which says something about the weirdness of Sillitoe's reputation: two books that 50 years ago everyone bought and read and, as I've learned, a slew of books following that nobody, at least in the U.S., paid any attention to. O tempus, o fugit, or whatever the phrase is. In any event, from the first two chapters, SNSM is a good novel that still stands up, depending on your capacity to withstand reading about binges of drinking, smoking, infidelity, and the tedious hours of work in a bicycle factory - actually, all better than it sounds (although I might not feel this way at 250 pp.) because if Sillitoe's fresh and clear narrative voice. You can easily see why this novel was such a shock to the British system, a story of post-war working-class life in the Midlands, very rough and very crude, times a little bit improved post war thanks to a domestic appetite for material goods (many references to the first car, the first "telly" in the working-class homes), the maturity and confidence that young men felt on return from the war, realizing it's a big world and they could, maybe, have a place in it, the stirrings of political activism as they realize they're not condemned to work in the same factory their entire life, and also a sense of despair - that a factory job and a detached house and a weekend at Blackpool may not be all there is - this mood I think made stronger in his next novel (or collection actually) Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. These were people whose voices had never been heard in English fiction, and in fact who were barely known or recognized by the British establishment - these people simply, for so many, did not even exist except in the abstract. Sillitoe upended so many standards of literary propriety it's hard to fathom today - post Kelman and so many other chroniclers of working class life, particularly in the world of immigrants to Britain - when Sillitoe's fiction seems much less exceptional, even conventional