[In The Widower's Son] Sillitoe sets up a metaphor which serves him throughout to tie together his story. It is the metaphor of life as battle, a man up against the world around him like a soldier facing an enemy. (p. 607)

[When William meets a woman at a party, he] drops all his tactics and makes a straight line for her, directly falling in love, proceeding to marry her soon afterwards. Getting the measure of that woman, Georgina, proves harder than charting any actual battlefield; the master gunner fails to keep his distance in the uncharted field of love, where secret forces he was unprepared to meet, assembled in a dead ground deadlier than he knew, wind up nearly destroying him. Strictly a male view, some will complain I suppose, this military metaphor with the woman cast as the enemy; but I found it a welcome change to...