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Close Of Play
They are young and entirely unconventional. They have finished at Cambridge and done the tour of Europe. Now the three friends need to earn a living, so they have set up a unique organisation – a very exclusive London club with high membership fees, affordable only to a select few, and where the services on offer are richly varied and exotic. The menu is sex, in every imaginable form, guaranteed to satisfy any craving and fulfil any desire. Some of the world's most prominent people make up the clientele.
Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
10 people want to read
About the author
Simon Raven
62 books30 followersSimon Arthur Noël Raven (28 December 1927 – 12 May 2001) was an English novelist, essayist, dramatist and raconteur who, in a writing career of forty years, caused controversy, amusement and offence. His obituary in The Guardian noted that, "he combined elements of Flashman, Waugh's Captain Grimes and the Earl of Rochester", and that he reminded Noel Annan, his Cambridge tutor, of the young Guy Burgess.
Among the many things said about him, perhaps the most quoted was that he had "the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel". E W Swanton called Raven's cricket memoir Shadows on the Grass "the filthiest cricket book ever written". He has also been called "cynical" and "cold-blooded", his characters "guaranteed to behave badly under pressure; most of them are vile without any pressure at all". His unashamed credo was "a robust eighteenth-century paganism....allied to a deep contempt for the egalitarian code of post-war England"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_R...
Among the many things said about him, perhaps the most quoted was that he had "the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel". E W Swanton called Raven's cricket memoir Shadows on the Grass "the filthiest cricket book ever written". He has also been called "cynical" and "cold-blooded", his characters "guaranteed to behave badly under pressure; most of them are vile without any pressure at all". His unashamed credo was "a robust eighteenth-century paganism....allied to a deep contempt for the egalitarian code of post-war England"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_R...
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 26, 2023
It is rather interesting to compare the current Goodreads synopsis for this novel which is available on the top of the page with what was published on the jacket flap of the 1986 edition which I have just read and will quote in full:
"A cricket week - the County Colts, the Butterflies, MCC - marks the closure of Baron's Lodge preparatory school* and the cricket ground's final game before redevelopment as a housing estate.
"'For now the shadows were lengthening over the ground and the birds were failing in their song. There were forty runs to get and twenty minutes in which to get them. The MCC captain, knowing Hugo must soon make a mistake if only from weariness, was continuing with the slow bowlers who were the more likely to elicit it. One last effort, thought Hugo; now or never. He faced up to a tall, stringy, left-handed bowler, who was given the ball plenty of air and bringing it in, with pungency, from the leg. One last effort.'
"The death of Lionel Escome, heir to Baron's Lodge, during a Cambridge cricket match at the hand and bat of his cousin Hugo Warren, is accidental. The fatality is the first in a sequence of disasters which forces James Escome, the headmaster and Lionel's father, to close the school. It could have been saved by Hugo, James's younger cousin, but the lure of London's gaming tables and the excitement of fine legs find a more lasting place in his heart than loyalty to his surrogate father and the girl he should have married."
The difference between the synopsis on the 1968 and 2008 editions says almost everything you might want to know about how the UK has changed, in ways unimaginable, in forty years. The 2008 synopsis is not inaccurate, but that of 1986 (which presumably is similar to the original 1962 publisher's blurb) is not only more more accurate in terms of the novel's content but in what was thought of as the salient points for selling the novel to readers in 1986 it was still cricket, boarding schools, with diversions into the flesh pots of London and house parties in the home counties that Raven's readers wanted. In 2008 publishers would only emphasize the sex, something Raven was never very good at and which was peripheral to the novel's real theme. This novel was intended as a portrait of the changes over taking England with its old and venerable institutions and beliefs, which Raven was portraying as being undermined and betrayed by the shoddy, the meretricious, the greedy, the new, the modern. Raven's readers hated the modern and any of the changes that seemed to go hand-in-hand with the retreat from power and empire post WWII. Raven's readers were almost certainly men (it is almost impossible to imagine a woman reading and enjoying Raven's novels) who went to grammar** or minor public schools (though they probably tried to claim a better school than they went to) working in jobs that had lost a lot of their cachet, and financial rewards that had once placed them comfortably above working class jobs, but still allowed those doing them to believe they were middle class. They were conservative, convinced that England (they would never think in terms of the UK) had gone to the dogs and that what was special and good about England (particularly her empire and great power status) was being, or had been, lost.
Simon Raven had a large readership, which can be seen in the proliferation of editions of his works throughout his life and after his death, though he never had the 'best seller' sales of authors like Alistair Maclean or Ian Fleming. He also achieved a certain prominence as someone of politically incorrect views, ideas, habits and ways of living (he would have been against everything WOKE including the word which would never have passed his lips because he would have viewed it as irredeemably vulgar, left-wing and middle class. He loved the idea that his life as an unashamed voluptuary of food, wine and high living was an offence to moralists and Mrs. Grundy's everywhere.
I read a large number of Raven's books in the 1970's and 80's, including this one, and have recently been rereading as many as I can get hold of and having read 'Close of Play' I was unsure of what to say about it. I couldn't just dismiss it because Raven clearly was attempting to say something about the 'state of the nation' with the prep school Baron's Lodge standing in for England and Hugo Warren for the younger generation failing to live up to a great inheritance and obligations. In a short novel there is a lot of purple prose to conjure up those atavistic feelings based on class and belonging and there is also a great deal of 'philosophising' as Hugo seeks to justify indulging his pleasures rather then going back and helping to save the foundering prep school.
There is nothing wrong with writing about snobbery or falling in love with something and someone unobtainable. Proust wrote over twelve volumes about Swann's love for the duc and duchesse of Guermantes and their world only for him to discover as he is dying that his love is not reciprocated and that he has wasted his time on people and things of no worth.
Raven is no Proust, he is not even an Anthony Powell, and his attempts to either portray what he thinks is fine in the old and how it is betrayed by Hugo's selfish desires and society's vulgar elements is just silly and contrived. Raven has the school fail because of cash flow problems, their bank won't give them an overdraft, and local shop keepers won't allow them to run credit anymore because of the machinations of a common trades person and local councillor whose son was refused a place in the school because, having only attended state schools, he had no skills except Plasticine moulding. It is such a farrago of the absurd and the pot boiler, with 'common' people dropping 'h's' like there was no tomorrow, but what is the point?
The real failure is Hugo, the young man who 'betrays' and 'lets down' his uncle, who loves him and has raised him since age 12 when his parents were killed in the blitz. But in what scheme of things is it necessary or right for a young man to sacrifice his life simply to keep some silly school for young boys going? Prep schools go under all the time - his uncle actually was better off selling up his assets and going off to live a comfortable retirement on the proceeds (and what bank in any country at any time has refused to advance money against collateral?!). Hugo is like everyone else in the novel, a cipher, you can't love or hate him because he is a stand-in for attitudes Raven wants to project.
Raven writes well, and he gave me enjoyment many, many years ago, so I am giving him a sentimental but probably undeserved three stars. I can't recommend the book but if you are tempted to sample Raven's oeuvre then it is a good place to start and this novel is abundantly available in the UK in hardback in very good condition for as little as £2.50 including postage (as of August 2023.
*As this is England a 'prep' school is a school that prepares boys (now also girls) between 8 and 13 for 'public school' the private, largely boarding, schools that in the USA are known as 'Prep' schools. If confused message me and I will try and explain further - or google it - they explain it quite well.
**'grammar' schools in the UK were a very specific type of school that flourished up until 1976 (but even that is complicated) - they were secondary schools teaching children between 12-18)
"A cricket week - the County Colts, the Butterflies, MCC - marks the closure of Baron's Lodge preparatory school* and the cricket ground's final game before redevelopment as a housing estate.
"'For now the shadows were lengthening over the ground and the birds were failing in their song. There were forty runs to get and twenty minutes in which to get them. The MCC captain, knowing Hugo must soon make a mistake if only from weariness, was continuing with the slow bowlers who were the more likely to elicit it. One last effort, thought Hugo; now or never. He faced up to a tall, stringy, left-handed bowler, who was given the ball plenty of air and bringing it in, with pungency, from the leg. One last effort.'
"The death of Lionel Escome, heir to Baron's Lodge, during a Cambridge cricket match at the hand and bat of his cousin Hugo Warren, is accidental. The fatality is the first in a sequence of disasters which forces James Escome, the headmaster and Lionel's father, to close the school. It could have been saved by Hugo, James's younger cousin, but the lure of London's gaming tables and the excitement of fine legs find a more lasting place in his heart than loyalty to his surrogate father and the girl he should have married."
The difference between the synopsis on the 1968 and 2008 editions says almost everything you might want to know about how the UK has changed, in ways unimaginable, in forty years. The 2008 synopsis is not inaccurate, but that of 1986 (which presumably is similar to the original 1962 publisher's blurb) is not only more more accurate in terms of the novel's content but in what was thought of as the salient points for selling the novel to readers in 1986 it was still cricket, boarding schools, with diversions into the flesh pots of London and house parties in the home counties that Raven's readers wanted. In 2008 publishers would only emphasize the sex, something Raven was never very good at and which was peripheral to the novel's real theme. This novel was intended as a portrait of the changes over taking England with its old and venerable institutions and beliefs, which Raven was portraying as being undermined and betrayed by the shoddy, the meretricious, the greedy, the new, the modern. Raven's readers hated the modern and any of the changes that seemed to go hand-in-hand with the retreat from power and empire post WWII. Raven's readers were almost certainly men (it is almost impossible to imagine a woman reading and enjoying Raven's novels) who went to grammar** or minor public schools (though they probably tried to claim a better school than they went to) working in jobs that had lost a lot of their cachet, and financial rewards that had once placed them comfortably above working class jobs, but still allowed those doing them to believe they were middle class. They were conservative, convinced that England (they would never think in terms of the UK) had gone to the dogs and that what was special and good about England (particularly her empire and great power status) was being, or had been, lost.
Simon Raven had a large readership, which can be seen in the proliferation of editions of his works throughout his life and after his death, though he never had the 'best seller' sales of authors like Alistair Maclean or Ian Fleming. He also achieved a certain prominence as someone of politically incorrect views, ideas, habits and ways of living (he would have been against everything WOKE including the word which would never have passed his lips because he would have viewed it as irredeemably vulgar, left-wing and middle class. He loved the idea that his life as an unashamed voluptuary of food, wine and high living was an offence to moralists and Mrs. Grundy's everywhere.
I read a large number of Raven's books in the 1970's and 80's, including this one, and have recently been rereading as many as I can get hold of and having read 'Close of Play' I was unsure of what to say about it. I couldn't just dismiss it because Raven clearly was attempting to say something about the 'state of the nation' with the prep school Baron's Lodge standing in for England and Hugo Warren for the younger generation failing to live up to a great inheritance and obligations. In a short novel there is a lot of purple prose to conjure up those atavistic feelings based on class and belonging and there is also a great deal of 'philosophising' as Hugo seeks to justify indulging his pleasures rather then going back and helping to save the foundering prep school.
There is nothing wrong with writing about snobbery or falling in love with something and someone unobtainable. Proust wrote over twelve volumes about Swann's love for the duc and duchesse of Guermantes and their world only for him to discover as he is dying that his love is not reciprocated and that he has wasted his time on people and things of no worth.
Raven is no Proust, he is not even an Anthony Powell, and his attempts to either portray what he thinks is fine in the old and how it is betrayed by Hugo's selfish desires and society's vulgar elements is just silly and contrived. Raven has the school fail because of cash flow problems, their bank won't give them an overdraft, and local shop keepers won't allow them to run credit anymore because of the machinations of a common trades person and local councillor whose son was refused a place in the school because, having only attended state schools, he had no skills except Plasticine moulding. It is such a farrago of the absurd and the pot boiler, with 'common' people dropping 'h's' like there was no tomorrow, but what is the point?
The real failure is Hugo, the young man who 'betrays' and 'lets down' his uncle, who loves him and has raised him since age 12 when his parents were killed in the blitz. But in what scheme of things is it necessary or right for a young man to sacrifice his life simply to keep some silly school for young boys going? Prep schools go under all the time - his uncle actually was better off selling up his assets and going off to live a comfortable retirement on the proceeds (and what bank in any country at any time has refused to advance money against collateral?!). Hugo is like everyone else in the novel, a cipher, you can't love or hate him because he is a stand-in for attitudes Raven wants to project.
Raven writes well, and he gave me enjoyment many, many years ago, so I am giving him a sentimental but probably undeserved three stars. I can't recommend the book but if you are tempted to sample Raven's oeuvre then it is a good place to start and this novel is abundantly available in the UK in hardback in very good condition for as little as £2.50 including postage (as of August 2023.
*As this is England a 'prep' school is a school that prepares boys (now also girls) between 8 and 13 for 'public school' the private, largely boarding, schools that in the USA are known as 'Prep' schools. If confused message me and I will try and explain further - or google it - they explain it quite well.
**'grammar' schools in the UK were a very specific type of school that flourished up until 1976 (but even that is complicated) - they were secondary schools teaching children between 12-18)
March 7, 2025
3.5, rounded down.
The 23rd of Raven's novels for me to read, his 4th published, from 1962 - and probably my least favorite of them all. There are several factors making this so: first of all, the protagonist, one Hugo Warren, is undoubtedly one of the vilest characters ever created - and not even in a 'fun' way - just utterly unredeemable. Secondly, as the title indicates, this has an inordinate amount of cricket in it, being rendered in minute detail, and as I know next to nothing about the sport, endless pages of googlies and such made my eyes glaze over.
I take it from my friend Liam O's much more erudite and explicit review, that this is all meant to be a 'state of the nation' novel, and his review was invaluable in pointing out many things in it which I missed almost entirely - but it still didn't make me like it any the better. It is, however, as well-written and witty as any of Raven's other works, I read it all in about 24 hours, and the redemptive ending makes the preceding worthwhile, hence the 3.5 stars rating.
The 23rd of Raven's novels for me to read, his 4th published, from 1962 - and probably my least favorite of them all. There are several factors making this so: first of all, the protagonist, one Hugo Warren, is undoubtedly one of the vilest characters ever created - and not even in a 'fun' way - just utterly unredeemable. Secondly, as the title indicates, this has an inordinate amount of cricket in it, being rendered in minute detail, and as I know next to nothing about the sport, endless pages of googlies and such made my eyes glaze over.
I take it from my friend Liam O's much more erudite and explicit review, that this is all meant to be a 'state of the nation' novel, and his review was invaluable in pointing out many things in it which I missed almost entirely - but it still didn't make me like it any the better. It is, however, as well-written and witty as any of Raven's other works, I read it all in about 24 hours, and the redemptive ending makes the preceding worthwhile, hence the 3.5 stars rating.
June 19, 2023
I asked a local bookstore owner what his favourite author was and he said it was Simon Raven... he grabbed this book and said, "you should only read this if you're prepared for the worst character you've ever met" - I said, that sounds interesting, and I bought the book. I finished the book today and Mr bookstore man was not lying. He was also not lying when he said it was spectacular and criminally underrated. this is a book I will never read again; but a book I will remember forever.
July 5, 2018
One day, desperate for something new to read, I grabbed this book from my mother’s shelf. By the time I finished it, I’d decided to seek out everything the author had written.
Simon Raven (1927-2001) wrote about the world of which he was part — that of the English and international upper middle classes; and his stories (nominally fiction but containing characters closely based on many of his contemporaries, so that he was in constant danger of libel suits) are among the most entertaining I’ve ever read. I do not mean the kind of entertainment provided by Tom Clancy: in his own words, “I’ve always written for a small audience of people like myself, who are well-educated, worldly, sceptical and snobbish (meaning that they rank good taste over bad)”.
Raven is best known for his Alms for Oblivion series of ten novels; But Close of Play is a standalone, an excellent introduction to his style, and I’m glad that (unlike many others) it’s still in print.
So try it.
If you do decide to go on to Alms for Oblivion, I strongly recommend you read the books in order of internal chronology (given at the bottom of Mr Raven’s Wikipedia article).
Simon Raven (1927-2001) wrote about the world of which he was part — that of the English and international upper middle classes; and his stories (nominally fiction but containing characters closely based on many of his contemporaries, so that he was in constant danger of libel suits) are among the most entertaining I’ve ever read. I do not mean the kind of entertainment provided by Tom Clancy: in his own words, “I’ve always written for a small audience of people like myself, who are well-educated, worldly, sceptical and snobbish (meaning that they rank good taste over bad)”.
Raven is best known for his Alms for Oblivion series of ten novels; But Close of Play is a standalone, an excellent introduction to his style, and I’m glad that (unlike many others) it’s still in print.
So try it.
If you do decide to go on to Alms for Oblivion, I strongly recommend you read the books in order of internal chronology (given at the bottom of Mr Raven’s Wikipedia article).
January 1, 2017
Typical Simon Raven. Very well written, a nice little comedy, and sordid. I confess I read it for the cricket which Raven does very well ...
February 18, 2021
Simon Raven is always highly readable, and this early novel is no exception. It is a bit of an outlier in his canon, though, featuring neither gay nor supernatural themes. It does, however, feature lots of cricket (these scenes were totally unintelligible to this American reader), lots of sordid sex, some sleazy swindles, some murder. All in all, a very pleasant read for those who like this kind of thing.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews