The Feathers of Death

by Simon Raven

A classic tale of British army life that launched a great literary career

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Queer, British Literature, Gay Fiction, LGBT, Gay

208 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1972

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]

Although this was Raven's first published novel (in 1959, when he was 31), it was my 21st of his oeuvre to read - and might just be my favorite so far. It belongs to that sub-genre of books about gay relationships in military settings (see: Reflections in a Golden Eye, Quatrefoil, etc.) - both of which Raven had personal experience with.

Despite a couple of slow patches, most of this I found riveting, a masterclass in both plotting and characterization, and with an exceptional, often witty, prose style. In particular the final third, which details a court-martial proceeding, I found to be as well-done as The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial: A Drama In Two Acts, and it would make as dramatic a film or play as that classic.

[Nancy Oakes · Rating 5 out of 5]

like 4.5 rounded up.

I picked up this book based on its description as a "gripping thriller," but I'm not so sure I'd agree with that label. Thriller, no. Gripping, yes: once I started it I couldn't stop reading.

The Feathers of Death centers around the army regiment known as Martock's Foot, which dates from England's Civil War and which has been now posted to a fictional country known as Prepomene, a British colony where there have been "rumblings of rebellion." The regiment is a sort of closed society within itself, professing standards, "moral or otherwise" that are "liberal, tolerant, civilized and worldly," according to the narrator of this story, Captain Andrew Lamont. He reveals that

"...as is usual in regiments where most officers have reckonable social standing quite apart from their Army rank, relations between the officers were very informal,"

and that "a very easy relationship could and did exist between commissioned and 'other ranks.' " We also learn that the men were "by nature respectful, docile, loyal and, above all, responsive to kindness . . ." so that there was none of the "prying into mess bills, complaints about gambling, or investigations of sexual morals so common in the dowdier regiments." Even when some of the officers become aware that Lynch has become attracted to young Malcolm Harley, they pass it off as "infatuation at worst. Passing fancy. Here today, gone tomorrow." But as the situation between Lynch and Harley becomes more widely known, tensions begin to grow both among the officers and among Harley's companions, threatening the long and carefully-established order within the regiment and ultimately leading to a moment of personal reckoning that results in tragedy.

Obviously, there's much more to this book but I don't want to give away any more than necessary. I was fascinated by Alistair Lynch more than by any other character -- the author has afforded him a level of complexity that allows the reader to simultaneously blame him for his abuses of power, yet in a way, admire him for breaking the rules. But there are also questions of complicity, justice, of class tensions, and more that arise throughout the story, as well as the qualities that hold this small but close regiment together. All of these factors taken together make for an intense few hours of reading. I will also say that while this is a story written in the 1950s and set within the space of the British military, this book does not end up as either an indictment of or a moral commentary on homosexuality -- on the contrary, the author approaches the subject in his thoughtful, well-grounded and no-nonsense approach to this story.

Very very much worth the read; I so wish I could say more but that won't be happening. It is a very human story, and one I recommend highly.

ps/don't miss the fascinating introduction to this Valancourt edition, but save it until the end.

[ALEARDO ZANGHELLINI · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elegant, precise prose for this well-constructed army-romance-cum-courtroom-drama of a novel. The class-consciousness of the narrator makes his voice not only distinctive, but also instructive, with some genuinely illuminating and fascinating insights into the attitudes to homosexuality of upper, middle and lower-class British folks around the middle of the 20th century. Curiously, it seems to end on a moderately moralistic note, when the rest of the book avoids, and even ridicules, moralism so effectively.

The cover of the 1964 Panther paperback edition is notable for all the wrong reasons -- starting from the ludicrously inflated rhetoric at the back ("a tale of moral corruption") and ending with the illustration at the front. This (apart from bearing no relationship whatsoever to anything that happens in the story) is so trashy as to take all the humour out of its pulpiness. It depicts a subaltern soldier evidently harassed into submitting to physical labour by his superior -- a truly ghastly concoction which is equal parts hand-on-hip (male) femme fatale and ageing cane-wielding schoolmaster!

[Katrin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This story is about a tragic liaison of an officer with his much younger soldier during the colonial warfare of the British Empire. The story is told by a fellow officer in the regiment. I liked a lot how the story was told, quite tactful and in a most affectionate way. The inevitable dramatic end had to turn up any moment, and it did, quite quickly, too. What follows are accusations and the trial. For me the part of the trial was too long and stretched out too much. It killed for me the dramatic part of the story and the (negatively) climatic end of the book. Too bad, because otherwise this was a very believable, realistic, still very sensitive and carefully worded book, which does not point fingers or blame. This is exactly what I would like to see in a book that breaches the topic of male/male relationships in the army.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you look through my reviews of other Simon Raven novels you will find that I have serious reservations about most of his oeuvre. I don't deny that he can write, but in most of his books it is talent squandered. That is not the case with this book, his first which is really rather fine and although written from within the social conventions and attitudes of the 1950s English upper middle classes as exemplified by very unreformed and old fashioned members of the officer class it speaks true because it is not forced. Too many of Raven's later novels continued to promote these archaic views but in a way that echoed Evelyn Waugh in his drunken rants at White's.

I don't see any point going over this novel's storyline or strengths. There are some exceptionally fine and intelligent reviews on GR and I would recommend reading them because I endorse their praise of this novel.

[Nicolai Levin · Rating 2 out of 5]

DISCLAIMER: I am no native English speaker, so apologies for any mistakes or phrasing that sounds weird to you!


I came across „Feathers of Death“ through a recommendation the like of „If you enjoyed Evelyn Waugh’s ‚Sword of Honour‘ trilogy, you may also like …“

I did enjoy Waugh, so I bought and read Raven’s book and now I don’t know what to make of it.

The story is set in 1956 (the book being published in 1959 it was quite contemporary in its time) in a fictitious British colony named Pepromene. The narrator’s regiment is deployed there to ensure stability in the face of an upcoming insurrection of local tribes. One of the officers in the regiment starts an affair with a subordinate soldier which raises some eyebrows among his colleagues and the troop in general. When one exposed troop of the British forces comes under sudden attack from the rebels, the aforementioned soldier wants to take the dangerous mission to run for reinforcements, to prove the others that he is no weak „nancy boy“ but a real tough guy. The officer rejects this and orders the soldier back. When the soldier starts to make his run anyway, the officer shoots him in the back for disobedience and kills him. Later, a court martial tries to bring light to the matter, particularly to the question if the killing had been made for military necessity or out of anger. I won’t spoil the outcome or the (lame) twist at the end of the plot.

Well, this is it and it leaves me confused.

The dry and tongue-in-cheek rendering of the colony as told by the narrator (an intelligence officer) to the regiment’s officers might give a satirical note - making fun of Britain’s waning colonial aspirations, if only I could find a real-life country that would resemble Raven’s Pepromene.

Then there are a lot of military technicalities in the story: about ammunition sizes, tactics and the daily routine of the men. I found it a bit dull and boring, as it has none of the clever mockery of the absurdity of all things military that makes Waugh’s novels so entertaining and funny. Rather, I found it a bit of a glorifying buddy-story for a male audience of (would-be) veterans. Something like a Tom Clancy equivalent from the nineteen-fifties.

The court proceedings are way too elaborated in my view, lots of pages around legal definitions like the discrimination between manslaughter and murder, well-known to everybody familiar with legal matters and quite irrelevant for the rest of us.

Then there is the affair between the officer and the soldier. The introduction to the book by Gregory Woods states the novel as a milestone of queer literature. I tend to disagree. Although the topic of an all-male love affair must have been quite juicy in its time, I don’t think Simon Raven’s books does a favour to the cause of gay emancipation. It reproduces the problematic motive of the mature homosexual upper-class seducer, the full consent of the subordinate soldier remaining doubtful. Apart from questions of the involved gender, any sexual relation between an army officer and their subordinate soldier would be considered highly inappropriate even by today’s liberal standards. So why bother?

That brings us to the classical question asked in literature classes on all levels: What does the author want to tell us with his book?

Frankly, I don’t have the slightest idea.

[Cerisaye · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Sometimes we don’t talk very much. We just sit—very pleasant and comfortable. And sometimes Malcolm tells me things. About the village he lived in and the girls there; and what the men think of all of us. It’s all rather childish, I know.” “It’s worse than that,” I said, “it’s catastrophic. It’s a full-blown Theocritean idyl—set to music for a full orchestra by Verdi. Indiscretions nicely scored for the attention of the big drum and the man with the cymbal.”



Not a book to attract the casual reader, though definitely one that rewards those interested in its beautifully realised depiction of a closed society threatened, then catastrophically damaged by a relationship between an army lieutenant and a young soldier under his command. I don't know much about the British army in the 1950s but Raven had direct experience and was writing what he knew, with a degree of bile but affection, too.

It's a slow burn kind of book, narrated in retrospect by the lieutenant's friend and fellow officer, sympathetically but not unquestioningly. The novel passes no judgement, setting out in great detail the facts of the case, from all sides, leaving the reader to make up their own mind whether Alastair Lynch deserves what happens at the end of the court martial that forms the climax of the book. We spend a lot of time with Alastair, a charming, charismatic, intelligent man but also lazy, inclined to dissolution, chronically short of funds due to reckless gambling, reluctant to accept authority. Yet his men love and respect him, as do his fellow officers. In contrast, we know little about young Harley, the raw farmboy he seduces, a lower class representative of the 'great unwashed' who have inherited the post war world of the Welfare State and changing social structures.

Raven clearly puts a lot of himself into Alastair and it's hard to resist his charm so it's a credit to the writing that I ended up with very ambivalent feelings. It's a period piece yet curiously forward thinking in its attitudes to homosexuality, though by accounts Raven was himself bisexual. Really, the book isn't about an ill-fated gay romance (certainly the power balance makes it difficult to accept any notion of 'romance' and Lynch can be beastly as well as brave). It's about the army and upper class society under assault from modernising, democratising forces, and the new world order being imposed upon the creaky structures of about-to-be post imperial Britain. In a way we are still dealing with this fall out, see Brexit.

A quick read, thought provoking, occasionally infuriating, with echoes of Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Read the synopsis to see if it's a good fit, and if so then you are in for a bit of a treat. Memorable characters (Moley, for e.g.) and a vanished world brought back to life for a few hours, yet you finish glad progress has been made in some regards even if we have only replaced the privilege of rank and birth with that of money.

[Mike Clarke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Privates on parade: Simon Raven had a fine eye for absurdity, especially when it comes to moral panics, and The Feathers of Death, which follows the court martial of a British officer in postwar Africa for the transgression of a gay affair with one of his men (it wasn’t the sodomy that mattered so much as the betrayal of people like us, for his lover was - shriek! - a working class person), is full of it. The moral crusader who thinks ping-pong will keep the soldiers out of brothels (spoiler: it doesn’t). The officer’s Eton housemaster’s preference “for graceful and intelligent boys…[over] lumpish and stupid ones”. “A democracy in which human rights count for more than brains”, and - in the 1950s - he need not to give offence “to Mrs Smith of Birmingham, to our young and lovely Queen, to trades union leaders, to good form Conservative politicians - to everything and everybody in the Mediocrity State.” Phew.

Where insularity requires the appearance at least of conformity, those who won’t or can’t make the required effort are quickly isolated as pariahs. A febrile barrack room atmosphere quickly envelopes everyone, even the seemingly rational colonel, and events quickly spiral out of control, with lethal consequences. Raven once said he didn’t want to write about tragic, lovelorn queers condemned to lives of miserable isolation, but whether a body count as high as this is the answer is moot.

And although it’s people on small boats, trans and carers who are nowadays considered more of a nuisance than gay men or women, it’s more a case of the names change but the story remains the same. Raven wasn’t an easily pigeonholed sort. He hated the hegemony of movements and marches, and thought the state should stay out of people’s private lives, neither hindrance nor help. But he writes gracefully about being ‘other’ in a closed society, and a horror of over-familiarity and forced mateyness. If nothing else, he certainly marched to the beat of a different drum.

[Chris Cangiano · Rating 5 out of 5]

A quick and fascinating read about passion, abuse of power, male love and colonialism set in the Post WWII British army. Our main character Alastair Reynolds has developed an all encompassing love for one of the enlisted men, young Malcolm Hartley, serving under him in his regiment. Hartley for his part has situationally reciprocated. But the prejudices of the day and the fact that they are on active duty trying to uphold the last remnants of a failing empire in a far-flung colony lead to tragedy. The class elements are particularly interesting, most seem unconcerned about Reynolds homosexuality but the real issue seems to come in with Reynolds straying to have his affair outside of his wealthy private school educated enclave with the lower class Hartley. Reynolds is a powerful creation: educated, cynical, inherently likable, passionate but also self-obsessed, prone to abuse his authority to get what he wants or to use his worldliness to manipulate others to get his way. A great read. Thanks to Valancourt for reviving this lost novel.

[Trevor Harvey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This review contains spoilers.

What struck me most about this novel dealing with a cavalry regiment in the 1950s is the acceptance by the soldiers of a homosexual relationship between an officer and a drummer.

Although the affair is an important aspect of this novel, the role of duty and adherence to army regulations are the central issues.

I found the discussions about the rebellious African tribe confusing.

The final pages covering a trial are enthralling.

[Patrick Huser · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's not a highbrow novel but surely a very pleasurable reading. The plot is stringent and well narrated and I got carried away very quickly. The characters are clear and well portrayed without being clichéd or oversimplified. And the ending, although tragical, leaves enough space for speculation so that one can still hope that love might be possible. A typical Raven, I would say.

[Andrew Eder · Rating 2 out of 5]

Boring!! 90% military drama, 10% gay. WRONG. Should’ve been the other way around. The only reason it’s getting two stars is that it was well written and the characters were strong and the storyline had potential! And I didn’t hate all of the military drama, but I wanted more gay!!

Do not recommend.

[Vel Veeter]

This is the first novel by Simon Rvane, well known for his Alms for Oblivion series, which I am interested in but haven't read anything from. I am curious about all those big British novels collections from the Pallisers to the Forsyte Saga to Brothers and Strangers to Dance to the Music of Time to the Cazalet Chronicles, but have only read sparingly, as they're all big undertakings.

Anyway! This is presented through an imprint called the Gay Men's Press, which checks out, but is oddly marketing as a "Gay adventure" which feels out of sorts for the content here about colonial violence and homophobia and plenty of unnecessary death and violence. The tone doesn't scream adventure to me, and is closer to the William Golding Rites of Passage books that would come out twenty years later.

More so, this is an anti-colonial book as a regiment is sent to an English African colony to put down an uprising, and finds the time in the aftermath of the quelling of the uprising to try a gay man for murder after his lover is killed under suspicious circumstances. It has the weird feeling of novels and movies where the chaos and violence of the apocalypse is somehow set aside five minutes for a smaller also violent form of oppression.