Bring Forth the Body

Alms for Oblivion #9

by Simon Raven

Page edges tanned. Orders received by 3pm Sent from the UK that weekday.

Genres: Fiction

237 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Simon 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...

Reviews

[Doug · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5, rounded up.

As Raven is wrapping up his 'Alms for Oblivion' series, he's become more succinct, with fewer tangents; this probably has the 'tightest' plot of any in the series, so far. The body in question is that of Somerset Lloyd-James, one of the more disreputable and loathsome of Raven's reprobates - who is found with slashed wrists in the tub on page one. The rest of the book details Captain Detterling (who has become the de facto focus of the latter part of the series) and Leonard Percival becoming sleuths to ferret out the reason behind such drastic actions, in the hopes of avoiding any scandals which would bode ill for the Ministry. Alongside the usual hijinks, there is a sobering denouement, with Lloyd-James realizing too late that 'God is not mocked'.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 3 out of 5]

"So Somerset Lloyd-Jones is dead, floating in blood-pink water of the bath in his chambers at Albany. He was a Roman Catholic but a believer, a lecher who liked to pay for it, a landed radical who doffed his cap to fashionable socialism when it suited his gnawing ambition., The death of an MP my be unimportant but the lurid demise of one of Her Majesty's Secretaries of State-with Cabinet rank-could make trouble. Captain Detterling, fellow Member of Parliament, fellow friend through school, university and army, finds himself enlisted by both the Authorities and the powers-that-really-be to discover-and perhaps to cover up-what happened to poor unlovely but influential Somerset." From the flyleaf of the 1974 hardback uniform edition from Blond & Briggs.

This is the penultimate 'Alms for Oblivion' novel and I can't help seeing this as a scene setter for the final novel. It is a return to Simon Raven's original intent for the cycle as a:

"...series of novels, all telling separate stories but...linked...by the characters...soldiers, dons, men of business, politicians, writers and plain shits...drawn, in the main, from the upper and upper-middle classes...One aim is to portray both th(eir) weaknesses and strengths...and...to explain their failure to fit into modern Britain along with their curious alacrity to survive and profit...".

and in the first two novels published 'The Rich Pay Late' and 'Friends in Low Places' but the next six novels veered off and became the picaresque tale of Fielding Gray. The original characters occasionally appear, but in such minor ways that it is easy to forget that they, not Fielding Gray, were the original characters of the series (please see my footnote *1 below regarding reading sequence). It is no spoiler to reveal that the novel revolves around the death by suicide of Somerset Lloyd James (see my footnote *2 if you are interested in who Lloyd James was based on); Captain Detterling and Lord Canteloupe are centre stage and almost every forgotten character from those early novels is revisited, including such really minor ones as Jude Holbrook. Fielding Gray makes an appearance but is very much an also-ran in this story.

So what can I say about 'Bring Forth the Body' that I haven't said about any of the other novels in the series? honestly nothing new. Of course it is immensely readable and fun, all the 'Alms for Oblivion' novels are great fun and amusing but the very talent that Raven displays so easily shows up the really tawdry nature of the story line. This isn't a moral judgement. I am not condemning his scabrous or lascivious story elements. I am complaining that all the novels in the Alms for Oblivion sequence are completely disconnected from reality.

This is particular true of 'Bring Forth the Body' which came out in 1973, I am old enough to remember the 1970s, this was the era of PM's Heath and Wilson, the three day week, it was the setting that produced Margaret Thatcher (back then as education minister she first came to prominence for eliminating free school milk and earning the sobriquet 'Thatcher the Snatcher'). This was not long before the 1976 bailout of the UK by the International Monetary Fund. Britain was a basket case and the days when a member of the House of Lords, particularly a drunken buffoon like Cantaloupe, was appointed to an essential ministry like Commerce were long gone. The world Raven conjures up is the world of the 1950s, of Harold Macmillan, before the Porfumo scandal and 1960s irreverence, and even in his early novels Raven is ridiculously obtuse in his views (read my review of 'The Judas Boy' were I discuss Raven's view of the Cyprus 'crisis').

Raven created a world in his 'Alms for Oblivion' novels but it was a world with no connection to reality. That was fine for Ian Fleming in his Bond novels (but then again who reads the Bond novels now?) but Raven's attempts at portraying change never rises above disgruntlement.

If you are reading the entire 'Alms for Oblivion' series then you have to read this novel. I would never recommend it as a stand-alone novel.

*1 Although the Alms for Oblivion novels are now presented chronologically there is no evidence that Raven intended them to be read that way. Three years before Raven's death the novels were reissued in three volumes and the publication order was the one used, as it had been when a uniform edition was issued after the final novel published in 1976.
*2 It was a man named William Rees-Mogg who was editor of The Times of London (1967-1981) when being editor of any Fleet Street (does that mean anything to anyone under 60?) newspaper, never mind The Times, automatically made you a significant member of the 'establishment'. Nowadays he is probably remembered for his ridiculous son, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is, happily, no longer an MP.

[N N · Rating 5 out of 5]

What Raven does most admirably in the 'Alms for Oblivion' sequence is demonstrate how even flawed and corrupt men make social mechanisms function if the society is traditionally organised.

Curious how the most rigid moralists among writers always attract charges of immorality. Raven is a good example: much is always made of his dissolute lifestyle and predilection for being outrageous, so these are taken to exemplify his moral attitudes. Yet the moral statements he actually and often explicitly makes in his books are overlooked completely, in this particular case: God is not mocked. Certainly out of fashion, but well argued.

[Alex Sarll]

The odious Somerset Lloyd-James - arguably the most howling shit in a series rife with them - is dead. Suicide, motive unknown. A cover-up is quickly arranged so as not to inconvenience the Establishment of which Somerset was a part, but his old friend Captain Detterling - and that same Establishment - want to know more. There follows a sort of philosophical detective story, in which the investigators tour the characters of Alms for Oblivion, trying to ferret out details of Lloyd-James' past which may explain his demise. For saying they're meant to be operating covertly, they're very open about their aims, and nobody seems terribly reluctant to speak ill of the dead. So for much of the book, we get a lot more telling than showing, and at times Raven is practically dropping his own exegesis of his characters on to the page. Normally, an author showing his working in this way drives me up the wall. But like Lloyd-James, Raven always did have a certain flair for getting away with things he really shouldn't.

[Robert Ronsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's the ninth in the Alms for Oblivion series. It's 1972 and the body in question is Somerset Lloyd-James (it's disclosed in the opening 'Tableau') and he has committed suicide. The powers-that-be need to know why in case there is scandal lurking in the background that could damage the government.
What follows is a tour through the disreputable life of Lloyd-James as recollected by his 'friends' and the inimitable Maisie. The narrative is Simon Raven at his scurrilous best and there is a satisfactory conclusion.
This volume stands the test of time better than its predecessor but I wonder what the modern reader would make of Maisie's declaration that thanks to her ministrations, "He [Lloyd-James] went off with a bang like a bathroom geezer"!
One more to go.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Re-reading, just for fun. As a book, slight but enjoyable - apart from an overblown scene at memorial dinner where Raven's habitual gamey-ness tips over into pretentious bad taste. But it's loads of fun: a neatly constructed investigation into a mysterious death, spiced with lechery, double-dealing and some appealingly unpleasant central characters.

As a sequence, a roman fleuve, Alms for Oblivion (of which this is the ninth novel) serves as a marvellous corrective to the urbane surfaces of Anthony Powell and CP Snow: Raven's establishment figures are as devious and shady a bunch as ever governed a country, right up to the present day.