Alms for Oblivion
The first volume (of the three volume printing) of Simon Raven's Alms for Oblivion series has been unavailable in Canada for the several years I've been trying to get hold of a copy. I read The Rich Pay Late a while ago and wanted more. A couple of weeks ago I gave in and ordered a copy from England which turned out rather well as even with the postage it was considerably cheaper than buying from amazon.ca anyway. It arrived some time last week since when I have read all four books at a rather furious pace. Volumes two and three are now on their way.
What a refreshing change from Proust. I read 800+ pages of Raven in the time it takes me to grind through a couple of chapters of the dismal maunderings of Proust's utterly wet narrator. Raven writes about the business/political/demi-monde of 1950s London. It's fast paced, well written and utterly vicious. What really struck me about it is how similar in many ways the Macmillan Tories were to New Labour. It's the same mixture of sentimental and moralistic posturing while simultaneously stabbing a colleague in the back and making a few quid by utterly dubious means. Peter Mandelson would fit in beautifully.
I've heard Raven compared to Anthony Powell and Alms to Dance but, to me, the similarities are very superficial. They are both novel sequences and both are London centric and writing about the upper middle classes for the most part but that's about it. Powell's work has much more of an overarching narrative arc but in other respects is much less conventional. The careful sequence of short (temporally) but highly elaborated set pieces that carry the weight of the narrative in Dance have no counterpart in Raven whose narrative approach is quite conventional. Raven's style has a directness and attack which is about as far from Powell's carefully oblique sentence structure and phrasing as one could get.
I'm very much looking forward to reading more but until the other two volumes arrive it's back to the soggy Froggy.
What a refreshing change from Proust. I read 800+ pages of Raven in the time it takes me to grind through a couple of chapters of the dismal maunderings of Proust's utterly wet narrator. Raven writes about the business/political/demi-monde of 1950s London. It's fast paced, well written and utterly vicious. What really struck me about it is how similar in many ways the Macmillan Tories were to New Labour. It's the same mixture of sentimental and moralistic posturing while simultaneously stabbing a colleague in the back and making a few quid by utterly dubious means. Peter Mandelson would fit in beautifully.
I've heard Raven compared to Anthony Powell and Alms to Dance but, to me, the similarities are very superficial. They are both novel sequences and both are London centric and writing about the upper middle classes for the most part but that's about it. Powell's work has much more of an overarching narrative arc but in other respects is much less conventional. The careful sequence of short (temporally) but highly elaborated set pieces that carry the weight of the narrative in Dance have no counterpart in Raven whose narrative approach is quite conventional. Raven's style has a directness and attack which is about as far from Powell's carefully oblique sentence structure and phrasing as one could get.
I'm very much looking forward to reading more but until the other two volumes arrive it's back to the soggy Froggy.