Preview Old Devils
The 1986 winner of England's Booker Prize, and by all accounts doing very well over there, this novel about a group of elderly Welsh people and their romantic and alcoholic shenanigans is likely to have tougher sledding on this side of the Atlantic. Amis, as usual, offers some funny and even touching moments, but his peculiarly elliptical comic style takes some getting used to. His four aging couplesthree stay-at-homes, responding to the return among them of a TV poet, who has been a success in England, and his wifeare well enough characterized, but once the reader is inside their heads, they all think Amis thoughts: often surly, resentful, nostalgic and deeply conservative. (In one remarkable lunchtime scene several of the protagonists grumble about "the penal system, the health service, the BBC, black people," varying this with "eulogies of President Reagan, Enoch Powell, the South African government, the Israeli hawks . . . ," and there is no indication the author is anything but sympathetic.) The sheer quantity of boozing that goes on is dizzyingthe men favoring whiskey and gin, the women (no really glaring misogyny here, only the usual undertone of Amis dislike) white wine. The expertise on the stages of drunkenness and hangover is, as always, awesome, but by the rather unfocused ending, which includes a sudden death, a wedding and a tentative reconciliation, the reader is likely to be as befuddled as most of the characters.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"The Old Devils" are aged drinking partners whose number is enlarged and enlivened when poet Alun Weaver and his wife Rhiannon return to Wales. Alun is a letch, a "frightful shit" in the words of one acquaintance, and Rhiannon still a beauty. Like pebbles dropped into a still pond, the Weavers set off a series of emotional waves that are still breaking at novel's end. Along the way Amis has characteristic fun with sex, drink, and fakery yet displays a largess of spirit lacking in his other geriatric comedy, Ending Up (1974). At least one happy ending is awarded here, to a character who had written off maturity as "an interval between two bouts of vomiting." This winner of Britain's Booker Prize is caustic, verbally dextrousand highly recommended. Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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