The Storyteller is something of a disappointment. Its main drawback is that it is much too tightly wound upon the armature of its narrative premise. Purporting to be the story of a 30-year career in professional storytelling, though its deeper preoccupations … are with a man's misery in marriage and with the disintegration of the ego in psychotic breakdown, it fails to find a satisfactory way of performing the tasks of characterization, plotting, and fable-ing that are expected from the down-to-earth sort of narrator the central character supposedly is. And, at the same time, this narrative premise … simply isn't believable….

The Storyteller is a bit too up to date as fiction for its own good. Subjectivity and self-consciousness reign to an extent that leaves almost no imaginative space to develop characters other than the tale-bearing hero, Cotgrave. (p. 35)

Alan Sillitoe is one of those writers who blows hot and...