Books
September, 1968
There must be something about the artist's easel and the desert's sand that releases the Dionysian in an Englishman. Witness Joyce Cary and T. E. Lawrence. Now add Alan Sillitoe's A Tree on Fire (Doubleday), a king-size joy of a novel that mixes gunpowder and rose madder, to set off an explosion that splashes blood and paint from Nottingham to Djebel-Djurjura. Sillitoe is the working-class incendiary who gave us Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. In...
