''Key to the Door'' is a novel by English author

Alan Sillitoe Alan Sillitoe Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, FRSL (4 March 192825 April 2010) was an English writer and one of the so-called "angry young men" of the 1950s. He disliked the label, as did most of the other writers to whom it was appl ...

, first published in 1961.

Synopsis

''Key to the Door'' is the story of a young man growing up in the grim backstreets of Nottingham, England in the 1940s. He attempts to find a way of shaking off the stifling working class expectations that are thrust upon him from all sectors of society. After leaving school for a soulless job in a cardboard factory and at 18 marries a girl who he has been in a relationship with for 3 years, and who he has made pregnant. He is finally called up for National Service and sent to

Malaya Malaya refers to a number of historical and current political entities related to what is currently Peninsular Malaysia in Southeast Asia: Political entities * British Malaya (1826–1957), a loose collection of the British colony of the Straits ...

during the Emergency where he finds himself an unwilling combatant against Chinese

communist Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a s ...

s, whom he thinks of more as comrades in the

class struggle Class conflict, also referred to as class struggle and class warfare, is the political tension and economic antagonism that exists in society because of socio-economic competition among the social classes or between rich and poor. The forms ...

rather than as enemies. Based in part on the author's own experiences in Nottingham and in Malaya, the novel was unfavourably compared to the author’s previous stories of working class life in Nottingham, '' Saturday Night and Sunday Morning'' and ''

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner" is a short story by Alan Sillitoe, published in 1959 as part of a short story collection of the same title. The work focuses on Smith, a poor Nottingham teenager from a dismal home in a working clas ...

'', but proved popular enough to be reprinted in 1978.

Relation to other books

''Key to the Door'' is the second part of the Seaton family trilogy which commenced with '' Saturday Night and Sunday Morning'' (1958) although chronologically it is set before the earlier book. Critical response to the novel was largely negative. The third book is '' The Open Door'' (1989).Steven H. Gale -Encyclopedia of British Humorists: Geoffrey Chaucer to John Cleese 0824059905 1996 "Many of Sillitoe's subsequent novels are interrelated, even though some were published decades apart. Thus, for example, Brian Seaton, the semi-autobiographical protagonist of Key to the Door and The Open Door, is the older brother of Arthur Seaton; the first novel to have been written in what is now termed the "Seaton trilogy" is actually the third in the chronology of the plots. The novels of the "William Posters Trilogy," however, were published in chronological order— The Death of . In 2001 Sillitoe revisited the Seaton family in his novel ''Birthday'', but this time the focus was on Arthur Seaton's brother Brian, a successful writer of TV sitcoms.

References

{{Reflist 1961 British novels Social realism Novels by Alan Sillitoe Novels set in Nottingham Roman à clef novels W. H. Allen & Co. books