Places Where They Sing

Alms for Oblivion #7

by Simon Raven

Part of the witty and sometimes nasty Alms for Oblivion series, each book has some repeating characters and can stand alone. Set in post WWII England, this recounts a struggle in student unrest at Lancaster College with plenty of sex, humor and a revolutionary agitator. A series with many fans.

Genres: Fiction

224 pages, Hardcover

First published September 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 3 out of 5]

3.5, rounded down.

After the rather lugubrious 6th volume in the 'Alms for Oblivion' series (The Judas Boy), I thought we'd hit our nadir in the series - only to find this one several levels more dispiriting. Its major crime is that roughly the first third is downright boring, and things don't really get going till halfway through.

Plus, much of it deals with new characters, with really only Tom Llewyllyn and Robert Constable the foremost of the returnees, aside from the rather surprising return of Daniel Mond, whom we had assumed committed suicide at the end of The Sabre Squadron. . Even worse, ostensible MC Fielding Gray doesn't even make an appearance till the final 30 pages and is sorely missed.

This centers around student unrest at Lancaster College over competing plans for a 250,000-pound windfall (either building new modern student housing or refurbishing the Cathedral and subsidizing the Choristers - ho hum) and is purportedly a satire of some minor such skirmishes that occurred on campuses in the UK in the late '60s'. It's all a bunch of hooey and one never gets very invested in either the situation or the new characters. Still Raven eventually comes up to speed with a few fun set-pieces, but hopefully we'll return to form in volume 8.

[Alex Sarll]

I've lived in three cities: London, Cambridge and Derby. And when it comes to novels not merely set in, but actively *about* London, I love them. Obviously not all of them (there's far too much extruded litfic about the social divides for that, with a thousand complacent bankers and their thousand poor cleaners), but plenty. Derby doesn't tend to crop up as a subject, which frankly is for the best. But then there's Cambridge. It pains me to admit it, but the other place does a lot better in fiction; if you want an Oxbridge novel, it's generally an Oxford novel, be that Brideshead or Iris Murdoch, Philip Pullman or Zuleika Dobson. Maybe it's the greater age, the balmier climate, or having more of an actual city attached. Penelope Fitzgerald's St Angelicus, Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse - these never felt like Cambridge to me, even though (especially because?) I went to Porterhouse's model. The only person I can recall pulling it off was Stephen Fry, back in those distant days when he was a cult figure rather than the nation's faintly embarrassing uncle. Simon Raven, alas, cannot be added to that list. Given Alms for Oblivion is a survey of the postwar social scene, it has necessarily contained many dated targets and erroneous prognostications. In this seventh volume, set in 1967 at a thinly-disguised King's, they just grate that little bit more. The clumsy pederasts and waspish manipulators among the fellows are recognisable enough, but the plot is mostly driven by a caricature of student reform movements in which the young, seeking greater liberties, are harnessed by socialist dons and mysterious agitators (all with hypocritical tastes for the finer things in life, of course). I don't doubt that there were a few extremists who wanted to build skyscrapers on the lawns and meadows; maybe there were even a few believing souls who yelled 'Castro!' instead of 'Christ!' during sex. Yet somehow, the ones here never quite convinced me. The earlier volumes also included exaggerated examples of largely departed types, but I suspect the difference is that their exemplars were closer to Raven's own experience, so had more details from the life to give spirit to their broad brushstrokes.

[Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stephen Fry reckons that this series of novels is better than Dance to the Music of Time. There is a slight problem with this opinion. Stephen Fry is talking utter balls. The difference is like listening to Duke Ellington or George Melly. Unlike the Powell, this has dated and seems like the erudite but boozy storytelling of someone showing off. Powell sits (with equal or greater erudition) and observes more quietly and more accurately.

Having said that, there is a lot of fun to be had at a George Melly concert. This isn't Raven at his best but it is nonetheless entertaining and a reminder of how much our viewpoints have changed in forty years.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Lancaster College, Cambridge, has a windfall of £250.000...the governing body splits into factions and cabals...One group wants a...thorough restoration of the chapel and choir school...(others) to desecrate the famous grounds with...a block of student accommodation...

"Times are not normal...a shrill new voice...(is) heard: the students demanding their solution - the extreme one...under the baleful influence of...a professional agitator...(and are) incited into a series of protests against authority...(and) On Madrigal Sunday...a scene of such violence and destruction that the calm courts of Lancaster will never be the same again." From the jacket sleeve of the original 1970 uniform edition produced by Anthony Blond for libraries etc.* provided because there is no summary or synopsis provided on Goodreads (as of March 2023)

In this novel Raven turns his attention to the various 'campus protests' and 'student disturbances' that the UK experienced in the late 1960s. I can't help putting these protest and disturbances in quotation marks because I wonder if they even register on the historical, never mind the popular, memory of Britain in the 1960s. Clearly compared to the better known and more significant disturbances that wracked US universities the English ones hardly merit a mention even as a damp squib. Everything about the storyline is absurd and over the top as well as cliched. The fact that anything to do with the students attracts adjectives like 'shrill' is typical of the over heated and fervid imaginations of all the usual bores who proclaim they are standing up for decency and values in the face of left wing philistinism. It is particularly amusing when you remember that the greatest attacks on and destruction of London's architectural heritage was done under the conservative government of Harold Macmillan (aided by a conservative dominated London local government). If they had had their way most of central London including Regent Street, Piccadilly Circus and Carlton House Terrace would have been levelled to build motorways.

Various of the characters from the earlier novels are here but it is hardly a portrait of how Universities or politics were run, even from behind the scenes, at that time or later. But then Raven had largely abandoned any attempt at providing a portrait of Britain's upper middle and noble classes in any meaningful way. Various characters from earlier novel appear, but they are just a variety of louche grotesques with a laddel of wink-wink, nudge-nudge sex thrown which is supposed to be decadent but comes over more as the nursery room imaginings of some very inexperienced juveniles. That's the problem with sex in Raven's books it is all perversion - plenty of people doing 'naughty' things but nobody has any real sex and no one really seems to enjoy anything they do very much.

I can't help feeling that after three novels dealing with the life and times of Fielding Gray between 1945 and 1962 Simon Raven felt the need to get back to portraying the state of England and its center's of power. As the golf clubs of suburban England, the place were Raven lived and home to most of his readers, was excised by another 'youth' scare after the UK's pretty tepid student protests it seems a no brainer that he would set his latest novel in a Cambridge even more remote from current reality then Oxford in Brideshead Revisited.

The novel is readable but it can't be described as dated because it is a world removed from any time, just as his characters have long ceased to be real people but are just a collection of vices, nasty habits and occasional apercus on choosing a good wine or the proper shoes to wear 'in town'. You can't worry about these, they certainly aren't evil, there is just nothing there.

Although it can be read outside of the 'Alms for Oblivion' series I can't imagine why anyone would. At this point in time I can only imagine someone reading it if they are already, for some reason, addicted, to Raven's rather pallid characters from earlier novels.

*The novel is labeled the sixth in the 'Alms for Oblivion' series. It was only after the series was completed and later republished in various new editions that the novels were renumbered into their chronological order. I disagree with this arrangement because it is clear from the way they were written that Raven's had no intention of the novels being read chronologically. This is particularly clear in 'The Rich Pay Late' and 'Friends in Low Places' they read, are constructed and the characters introduced as if these were the opening two volumes rather then fourth and fifth in the series. In the case of this novel its placement of seventh novel applies to both published and chronological order.

[Corto · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short farce about the clash between Progressive and Traditional values in the UK, in 1967. The venue is Lancaster College, Cambridge, where a (seemingly) Communist agitator exploits a star student to disrupt and destroy its elitist environment.

Though not stellar, it's among my favorite of the Alms for Oblivion cycle. It wasn't overwrought, and Raven seems to take swipes at everyone from Left to Right. Recurring characters from earlier volumes in this series appear, including Daniel Mond, Tom Lewellyn and Fielding Gray.

[Robert Ronsson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not the best of the Alms for Oblivion series but it's an entertaining read nevertheless. Here Simon Raven is satirising a reactionary establishment as it tries, in the 1960s, to come to terms with the unprecedented rise of youth culture, particularly its fad for 'equality'.
All the main characters are here and Raven spends perhaps too much time focusing on their sexual predilections and the ways in which these lead to the characters' undoings. If Raven's books in this series were plays they would be described as 'bawdy romps'. In this one the rumpy-pumpy is over-done but it doesn't detract too much from Raven's ability to puncture the pomposity of people in power be they in the corridors of Westminster or the groves of Academe.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the best book in the series

[Aodhán Shadlow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't typically review these individually, and I gave up on ratings, but fuck me what a great novel. Simon Raven is incredible.

[N N · Rating 4 out of 5]

The imbecility and viciousness of 60s student protests, Raven-style. A minor Raven, though: the book suffers from being too sketchy as it races to the suspenseful conclusion. A lot of scenes and characters could take quite a bit of fleshing out.