REVIEW OF THE OLD DEVILS #53

TOM’S REVIEW

THE OLD DEVILS by Kingsley Amis

A famous late 20th C. Welsh poet, Alun Weaver, after a lengthy stay abroad, returns to the bosoms of both a land and a group of friends with which/whom he has a fraught relationship. The opinion of 83% of JFDI members pretty much mirrors that of the character Charlie Norris, whom Alun asks to review his initial stab at writing a novel: “I read twenty pages carefully, then skipped to the end.”

Kingsley Amis won a Booker Prize and a gushing review from his writer son Martin for a novel of manners about a month or so in the life of twelve sexegenarians (more or less) whose common bonds are sex, booze and regret. Like the best of Henry James, THE OLD DEVILS reads like a play with clever and demanding prose. Unlike any Henry James I’ve read, there isn’t a single character you don’t want to beat the living shit out of. 

Which means, if you read it for story and character, you want to bin it after twenty pages, let alone skip to the end. And if you read it for style, passages like “He had seen a good deal of that sort of glance at school, where he had been bullied more than his fair share for a boy not undersized, foreign or feeble…” or “there is a Welsh word truth, same word, spelt the same anyhow, and it means falsehood” make you want to hang in there.

Ultimately, this is a work by a writer about a writer, which may be why the writer Martin Amis , aside from wanting back in the will, called it a book that “stands comparison with any English novel of the century” . Mind you, he didn’t say what comparison. 

3.5 stars

ERIC’S REVIEW

A word to the wise. Never read a book where the most glowing report comes from the author’s son.

Like having your teeth pulled by a long-winded dentist with palsy and halitosis. The best part about this book was that it ended, eventually. 

Not with a bang (though the main character Alun popped his clogs in one of the most matter-of-fact banal life-endings ever) but with a whimper. 

Nope, I cannot agree with my learned friend Tom that this book made it above the mediocre. 

Booker, schmooker. 

2 stars. (Because I like it when the Real Welsh Sing Land of My Fathers at the Millennium, nothing to do with old farts getting drunk at the squash club and banging each other’s wives)