There is a reformatory in Essex County, UK. A boy is running.
The location could immediately lead us to a free association: a jailbreak is in progress. Instead, the boy is simply working out, doing it every morning since he arrived at that place. The warden has convinced him that with that physique he can run a marathon, and he is sure that from the boy’s legs will come a trophy at the upcoming athletic games organized among British penitentiaries.
To speak of a marathon within a prison institution seems like a paradox, yet Alan Sillitoe manages to construct a narrative that reaches maddening depths.
Freedom, behind bars
The protagonist of The Loneliness of the Marathon Runner experiences at each training session the weight of a double conviction: one for robbery that landed him behind bars in a reformatory and another, more subtle one represented by the warden’s ambitions to win. In more than one circumstance he has a chance to escape, along the circuit he travels several times he has spotted passages to the free world, but he seems not to care.
In reality, something has clicked in the prisoner’s head, an idea of freedom that deviates quite a bit from the typical patterns of the penitentiary, where physical boundaries are obvious and the concept of separation is chewed on every day. Running has become the key to a new freedom: “this fun of the marathon, it is the best of all because it allows me to think, so well that I learn things even better than when I am in bed during the night.” Here is where the workouts become the place to recognize oneself. The protagonist grows page after page in awareness and repeatedly goes back in time, looking at the plight of his family and the reasons that led him behind bars. A typical story of the working class of provincial England, in which children who grew up on the streets are asked to leapfrog adolescence and immediately catapult themselves into the complexities of the adult world. Ending up in juvenile hall becomes almost physiological.
But in the meantime, training continues, the race is approaching, and the expectations of the reformatory director who now treats his athlete-inmate as a kind of racehorse are growing.
A brain in motion
The loneliness of the marathon runner is a tale somewhere between confession and stream-of-consciousness, we enter the mind of the protagonist so thoroughly that we look at the race much more closely than usual: the boy who is running the usual circuit around the penitentiary is not simply a runner, but is a brain in motion. It is running that releases the inner conflict, and it is always running that creates yet another paradox in this story: “when my eyes notice that I am near the end of the path I take a sprint, and I can do it so fast because up to that moment I have the impression that I have not run at all and that I have not wasted the slightest energy. And I succeeded because I kept thinking,” basically a kind of mental trance in which the physical fatigue felt is anesthetized, allowing the body to continue to be in motion.
In so many other accounts of running, we have noticed how some constants are present: physical fatigue, crossing the threshold, pain. With The loneliness of the marathon runner, instead, we are confronted with a character who experiences running in an almost disenchanted way, not as a physical activity but as a refuge. The end result, the race, becomes uninteresting, serving only the editor and yearbook writers.
A reading that pushes you to run
This famous story gives its title to a collection of short stories by Alan Sillitoe published in 1959 and arrived in Italy thanks to Minimum Fax (with a beautiful preface by Paolo Giordano). The rest of the work shifts to events firmly rooted in the English context of Nottingham, where Sillitoe’s narrative qualities are enhanced in speaking of suburbia, defeat, and destiny with an authentic, honest approach, always able to bring the reader closer to the many forms of everyday incommunicability.
It may happen, after reading and placing the book on the shelf, to lace up one’s shoes and go for a run. It may also happen that we meet other people who run like us. Concentrated, in the grip of thoughts and stories, like so many novels moving freely on roads and bike paths, while haste rules around them.
“So at the height of the barn I decided to leave it all behind and made such a dash, despite the nails in my belly, that in a very short time I gave both Gunthorpe’s and the birds a huge break.”
Andrea Martina
(Main image credits: Pablo García Saldaña on Unsplash.com)