Goodbye seems to be the hardest word

The English writer, Alan Sillitoe, has written many novels and short stories as well as eight volumes of poetry and an autobiography. Yet in a busy career, begun as long ago as 1958 with the publication of his powerful debut, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, followed within a year by a remarkable short story "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner", he has remained famous because of those two first works. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is the story of young Arthur Seaton, a Nottingham bike factory worker committed to drinking as much alcohol as a human body can hold, having sex with as many women - preferably married so there's no responsibility - and amassing an impressive wardrobe of good-quality clothes. "Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can't help being one. You can't deny that. And it's best to be a rebel so as to show 'em it doesn't pay to try to do you down."

Arthur, "don't let the bastards grind you down," lives by a basic philosophy, called survival. His world and that of Sillitoe's, a 1950s working class factory-to-pub society, remains defined by that first novel, now a classic, which itself defined the British realist novel. As has often been said, Sillitoe's earthy realism is far more convincing than that of Lawrence's impassioned lyricism. Karel Reisz's film version of the same title dominated by Albert Finney's abrasive lead heralded the start of British cinema's New Wave. The movie seems dated now, but the novel has survived the test of time, still as fresh and raw and different as it must have been on publication. That Silitoe has now, more than 40 years after that unforgettably atmospheric debut, written Birthday, a sequel, is interesting but also worrying. Why has he written it? More interestingly, is it a problem? and why? After all, nostalgia has never been a quality associated with Sillitoe.

Exactly when should authors decide to say goodbye to specific characters? Sequels are risky enterprises. They may bring a story on to the next stage; they may also tidy up the loose ends in the process. They may also prove ill-conceived. In truth sequels, unless they are a deliberate continuation or form part of a planned trilogy, tend to work badly or not at all. Updike's Rabbit quartet published at 10-year intervals not only chronicles the life of one man, Harry Angstrom, and his immediate circle, it also tells the story of the US as it staggered through more than 40 years of history. So dense with life, observation and characterisation are the novels and so consistent is Updike's voice that his recent decision to return to the Rabbit's story a decade after Harry's death in Rabitt Remembered is well-justified.

Last year Doris Lessing proved that a good sequel such as her Ben, in the World, could certainly do justice to an admittedly superior earlier book, The Fifth Child (1988). After a 12-year interlude, Lessing continued the story of young Ben Lovatt in a sequel form that manages to be seamless and convincing and also true to the voice and tone of the first novel, itself shocking and sufficiently definitive to appear not to require or suggest a sequel. Yet when it appeared last year, Lessing displayed a sharply disciplined narrative technique as well as an original feel for story. Together they represent not only her at her least autobiographical, but also at her best.

Other sequels have proved less well-judged. In 1961, Joseph Heller became famous with Catch-22 a great anti-war novel and a brilliant display of sustained comic surrealism. Some 33 years later he decided to revisit or rather resuscitate the genius of his first novel with the banal Closing Time, a disastrously poor performance that at best achieved a poor parody of his inspired debut. Sillitoe's disappointingly flat stroll down memory lane is almost as bad. Birthday takes the cocky Arthur Seaton some 40 years on. Having failed at marriage with Doreen, the girl who saved him - if not from himself, at least from furious cuckolded husbands - he is now married to Avril. It seems to have worked, but she is now dying. At the start of the novel Arthur, Avril, Brian, and Arthur's brother (but a footnote in the earlier book) are setting off for a birthday celebration in honour of Brian's first love, Jenny. She is now 70 and newly-released from years of tending her disabled husband.

It is a strange, bitter narrative. The dialogue, so often the life-force of Sillitoe's aggressive, candid writing, is here stagey and forced. The birthday party is quickly overshadowed by Avril's tragedy. Random references to the past, a past contained in the earlier novel, are made along the way and add little. Several of the minor characters are mentioned or make brief reappearances.

Age and sex are the two themes. The only interaction between the men and women in this novel is in the context of sex. The banter is sexually charged, not very funny and somehow not particularly desperate either, lacking even the sour humour of a Kingsley Amis. This book is tired without being moving. " `I'd never have believed it, you kissing a seventy-year-old woman like that.' They walked into more silence the closer they got to the cars. Avril felt it necessary to tell Arthur that Brian was seventy as well." Several of the narrative sequences take place in cars. There are detailed meditations on the apparent cunning it takes to survive as a modern driver. Brian takes over from Arthur as the central character. It is he who left and went to London making his fortune as a script writer. It is he who really made a mess of his life.

In the first novel, Arthur emerged as a vivid if not particularly likeable young man on the make. This time he is a caricatured shadow; his speeches are bitter and coarse. In fact, that is the essential difference between these two novels separated by a gulf of four decades and a long career - Birthday lacks the genuine power and urgency of the first book, which was textured and authentic. This one is crude, far less imagined. This time the characters never acquire the inner-life that drove Arthur and his circle in the first book. There is none of the hunger. Life and death, sex and love are big subjects, yet Sillitoe never manages to lift any of them or his novel above being a dreary, thin, angry performance that reads as little more than a parodic television script.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times