The Old Devils
Into a quiet retirement community come old friends and long-suppressed feelings, and relationships that seemed settled begin moving again. The novel treats aging, friendship, and the fractures of marriage with both humor and bitterness.
Work Information
Getting older does not make emotion any simpler to sort out.
Old friends and unresolved feelings resurface inside a quiet retirement life. Beneath the comic surface, the novel leaves behind the sadness of watching time change people.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Vintage Classics
- Published
- 2004-01-15
- Pages
- 208 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 12.9 x 2.5 x 19.9 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780099461050
- ISBN-10
- 9780099461050
- Price
- 2497 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Contemporary
Malcolm, Peter and Charlie and their Soave-sodden wives have one ambition left in life: to drink Wales dry. But their routine is both shaken and stirred when professional Welshman, Alun Weaver (CBE) and his wife, Rhiannon, join them.
KINGSLEY AMIS was born in south London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and St John's College, Oxford. After the publication of Lucky Jim in 1954, Kingsley Amis wrote over twenty novels, including The Alteration, winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, The Old Devils, winner of the Booker Prize in 1986, and The Biographer's Moustache, which was to be his last book. He also wrote on politics, education, language, films, television, restaurants and drink. Kingsley Amis was awarded the CBE in 1981 and received a knighthood in 1990. He died in October 1995.
Reviews
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good book
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Writing in his family started here! This man influenced so many writers. This book has characters who have not left my mind months after I finished the book.
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Having read all of Martin Amis' output including his autobiography 'Experience' where he discussed, at length, his fathers novels, I felt it was about time I went into his writing beyond 'Lucky Jim'. I was aware of Kingsley's fearsome drinking reputation and being something of an old 'piss artist' myself, felt this one would be the place to start. It did not disappoint. I was unprepared for the 'Wales and the Welsh' axis of the novel, but this was integral to the alcoholic them, truly funny and wonderfully observed. The woes, aches and pains, frustrations and frailness of old age are hilariously and tellingly highlighted as an ongoing motif. In all a delightful and dryly hilarious novel, I will certainly be reading more Kingsley Amis.
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I enjoyed the book ... almost every page had some sardonic comment that was worth a chuckle. In different sections you follow a different elderly character from a revolving cast of long-time friends. Many of the scenes are written very well, capturing the tiny implications, inferences and innuendo that lie beneath the surface of even the most casual conversation. One problem I had was trying to keep track of the secondary characters, in the end I gave up trying and enjoyed the cynical sarcasm, regardless of what character was supposedly mouthing it. But if you're looking for highly developed characters - or any character development at all - this isn't the book. The men, with one exception, are very similar. Actually, there is one character who surprisingly becomes somewhat sympathetic towards the end of the book, but I think I should pause now and erect the ... ====================================== SPOILERS ALERT LINE ====================================== There! Now that we're past that I can talk more freely. At the end it would have been interesting to see how Peter and Rhiannon got on, reunited as lovers (or not?) after all these years. Instead we only hear about it from the outside. Then again, anything more revealing may have been too big a departure from how the rest of the story has been presented. And was Alun's sudden death just a way to get Peter and Rhiannon together again? One senses the meddling of the authorial hand becoming a bit too obvious.
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A good read !
Related Literary Awards
- Booker Prize Edition 18 (1986) ・Winner