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The Vodi
Bereft of his mother, struck down by tuberculosis, betrayed by his sweetheart, Dick Corvey has no will to live. In his mind he regresses to an unhealthy boyhood fantasy, originally suggested by a dominating friend, about the Vodi and their leader Nelly, a sort of fat and malignant Hecate. As he lies in the sanatorium the personality of one of his nurses can do more for him than drugs.
- GenresFictionLiterature
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1959
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90 people want to read
About the author
John Braine
36 books39 followersJohn Gerard Braine was born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1922. He sprang to immediate fame in 1957 with publication of his first novel, Room at the Top, which was a critical success and a major bestseller in England and America and was adapted for the screen in an Oscar-winning 1959 film starring Simone Signoret and Laurence Harvey. His second novel, The Vodi (1959), met with mixed reviews and a disappointing reception, but was Braine’s favourite of his own works. His next book, Life at the Top (1962), a sequel to Room at the Top, sold well and was filmed in 1965.
Braine, who was commonly associated with what the British media dubbed the ‘Angry Young Men’ movement of working-class writers disenchanted with the traditional British class system, continued writing until his death in 1986, though as of 2013, all his works were out of print. Recently, there has been renewed interest in Braine’s work, with Valancourt Books’ reissues of Room at the Top and The Vodi, and a 2012 BBC miniseries adaptation of Room at the Top.
Braine, who was commonly associated with what the British media dubbed the ‘Angry Young Men’ movement of working-class writers disenchanted with the traditional British class system, continued writing until his death in 1986, though as of 2013, all his works were out of print. Recently, there has been renewed interest in Braine’s work, with Valancourt Books’ reissues of Room at the Top and The Vodi, and a 2012 BBC miniseries adaptation of Room at the Top.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 20, 2025
Forgotten fifties social realist drama fails to develop its intriguing potential.
Life has not been kind to Dick Corvey. He managed to survive the Second World War but since then his career has stalled, his fiancee has left him, and he has ended up in a tuberculosis sanatorium coughing his guts up. A nurse at the hospital has shown a flicker of interest in him but in his heart he knows he has nothing to offer this healthy and attractive young woman. With his life seemingly over almost before it has begun he lies bedridden for most of the day wallowing in illness and remorse. With nothing else to do he looks back on his past and wonders how life came to this.
The agents of all Dick's misfortunes are the Vodi, a race of pernicious, ferret-faced, gremlin-like creatures with glowing malevolent eyes. They dwell underground with their grotesque leader Nelly, a bloated, cackling, ogress who wears a dress decorated with human teeth and drives an ultra-luxurious Bugatti Royale. Nelly and her Vodi scheme tirelessly and invisibly to undermine all the good people in the world and help the bad to undeserved success.
This lurid vision started life in the schoolboy imaginations of Dick and his friend Tom (who has since done rather well for himself, further adding to Dick's chagrin). The Vodi don't exist, of course. Or do they? Feverishly ill and seething with resentment, Dick has come to half-believe that the Vodi might actually be real after all. What else could possibly explain all the terrible injustice in the world?
When I first heard about John Braine's forgotten second novel from 1959 it called to mind the comic-grotesque worlds created by Iain Banks some three decades later. I got the idea into my head that "The Vodi" might be some kind of ahead-of-its-time misunderstood lost classic but having finally tracked down and read a copy I can understand now why it failed to make much impression. Banks with his wild imagination and gruesome black humour would have gleefully played with the concept as a vehicle to explore the perverse role of good and bad luck in human affairs. Instead Braine introduces the Vodi in the opening chapters of his book but after that they largely dissapear and this promising idea goes maddeningly undeveloped. Thereafter the rest of the novel is a conventional post-war British social realist drama of a type associated with a few other writers of Braine's generation such as Alan Sillitoe. In this respect "The Vodi" is a readable but unremarkable example of its genre but what makes it such a frustrating book is that it could have been so much more.
A similar sense of unfullfilled potential marred much of Braine's subsequent life. His first novel "Room at the Top" had been an immensely popular bestseller but "The Vodi" was poorly received both critically and commercially and somewhat derailed Braine's initial momentum. He went on have a respectable enough writing career but never really repeated his early success and nowadays most of his books have been out of print for decades. Excessive drinking seems to have been a recurring problem and he passed away at the age of 64 having slipped into relative obscurity. Braine once explained that "The Vodi" was about the "essential unfairness of life" and the irony here is obvious and painful. Perhaps that shrieking mockery in the background is the Vodi getting the last laugh after all.
Life has not been kind to Dick Corvey. He managed to survive the Second World War but since then his career has stalled, his fiancee has left him, and he has ended up in a tuberculosis sanatorium coughing his guts up. A nurse at the hospital has shown a flicker of interest in him but in his heart he knows he has nothing to offer this healthy and attractive young woman. With his life seemingly over almost before it has begun he lies bedridden for most of the day wallowing in illness and remorse. With nothing else to do he looks back on his past and wonders how life came to this.
The agents of all Dick's misfortunes are the Vodi, a race of pernicious, ferret-faced, gremlin-like creatures with glowing malevolent eyes. They dwell underground with their grotesque leader Nelly, a bloated, cackling, ogress who wears a dress decorated with human teeth and drives an ultra-luxurious Bugatti Royale. Nelly and her Vodi scheme tirelessly and invisibly to undermine all the good people in the world and help the bad to undeserved success.
This lurid vision started life in the schoolboy imaginations of Dick and his friend Tom (who has since done rather well for himself, further adding to Dick's chagrin). The Vodi don't exist, of course. Or do they? Feverishly ill and seething with resentment, Dick has come to half-believe that the Vodi might actually be real after all. What else could possibly explain all the terrible injustice in the world?
When I first heard about John Braine's forgotten second novel from 1959 it called to mind the comic-grotesque worlds created by Iain Banks some three decades later. I got the idea into my head that "The Vodi" might be some kind of ahead-of-its-time misunderstood lost classic but having finally tracked down and read a copy I can understand now why it failed to make much impression. Banks with his wild imagination and gruesome black humour would have gleefully played with the concept as a vehicle to explore the perverse role of good and bad luck in human affairs. Instead Braine introduces the Vodi in the opening chapters of his book but after that they largely dissapear and this promising idea goes maddeningly undeveloped. Thereafter the rest of the novel is a conventional post-war British social realist drama of a type associated with a few other writers of Braine's generation such as Alan Sillitoe. In this respect "The Vodi" is a readable but unremarkable example of its genre but what makes it such a frustrating book is that it could have been so much more.
A similar sense of unfullfilled potential marred much of Braine's subsequent life. His first novel "Room at the Top" had been an immensely popular bestseller but "The Vodi" was poorly received both critically and commercially and somewhat derailed Braine's initial momentum. He went on have a respectable enough writing career but never really repeated his early success and nowadays most of his books have been out of print for decades. Excessive drinking seems to have been a recurring problem and he passed away at the age of 64 having slipped into relative obscurity. Braine once explained that "The Vodi" was about the "essential unfairness of life" and the irony here is obvious and painful. Perhaps that shrieking mockery in the background is the Vodi getting the last laugh after all.
January 28, 2018
I read the incoherent, messy first 50 pages and couldn’t find pleasure in it.
March 30, 2025
stumbled upon this in a bookshop in ireland. my copy was missing twenty pages but that was okay. it was fun and dark and witty and well written and ended.
April 5, 2015
My copy is actually titled "From the Hand of the Hunter" which was the first American title of Braine's second novel, The Vodi. Not as successful as his first, perhaps tinkering with the title was a publisher's strategy, as were several alternate cover designs intended to play up the sex appeal of the female characters, rather than the narrator's tuberculosis.
It strikes me there is a type of post-WWII novel where the war is not the subject, but lives of the characters are described both before and after, the latter transformed by the largely undescribed but of course significant interim events (Heinrich Böll's Billiards at Half-Past Nine is similar).
In this case, we know nothing about Dick Corvey's war experience but its aftermath finds him in a TB sanitarium; his fiance, regarding his case as hopeless, has left him but he has a strong mutual attraction with one of the nurses, and being looked at as a man rather than simply a case is presented as being a spur to his recovery.
A good chunk of the story is set a decade prior, in Corvey and his best friend's early adolescence, where they have invented a race of malign creatures called the Vodi, which perhaps they don't quite believe in but it is way to scare themselves as needed - more importantly, the Vodi are an externalization of their sense that life isn't fair - you don't just work hard and get ahead, rather there are destructive forces that arbitrarily single certain people out for failure. The milieu of the various adolescents and their mythology reminded me quite strongly of David Mitchell's Black Swan Green.
As Corvey carries this metaphor into his adulthood, I am reminded that writers in the so-called Angry Young Men movement often inveighed against the lack of social and economic mobility in Britain at the time - they underscored (without endorsing) the message to the lower-middle and working classes "you can expect this much and no more, so get used to it". Stan Barstow's A Kind of Loving about teenage pregnancy and consequent rushed marriage is similar and when I read it during my year at a working-class high school in England, I thought it was a rather grim bit of social engineering to prescribe it to the exact people it describes - perhaps the reasons for including it in the syllabus were a bit more nuanced.
It strikes me there is a type of post-WWII novel where the war is not the subject, but lives of the characters are described both before and after, the latter transformed by the largely undescribed but of course significant interim events (Heinrich Böll's Billiards at Half-Past Nine is similar).
In this case, we know nothing about Dick Corvey's war experience but its aftermath finds him in a TB sanitarium; his fiance, regarding his case as hopeless, has left him but he has a strong mutual attraction with one of the nurses, and being looked at as a man rather than simply a case is presented as being a spur to his recovery.
A good chunk of the story is set a decade prior, in Corvey and his best friend's early adolescence, where they have invented a race of malign creatures called the Vodi, which perhaps they don't quite believe in but it is way to scare themselves as needed - more importantly, the Vodi are an externalization of their sense that life isn't fair - you don't just work hard and get ahead, rather there are destructive forces that arbitrarily single certain people out for failure. The milieu of the various adolescents and their mythology reminded me quite strongly of David Mitchell's Black Swan Green.
As Corvey carries this metaphor into his adulthood, I am reminded that writers in the so-called Angry Young Men movement often inveighed against the lack of social and economic mobility in Britain at the time - they underscored (without endorsing) the message to the lower-middle and working classes "you can expect this much and no more, so get used to it". Stan Barstow's A Kind of Loving about teenage pregnancy and consequent rushed marriage is similar and when I read it during my year at a working-class high school in England, I thought it was a rather grim bit of social engineering to prescribe it to the exact people it describes - perhaps the reasons for including it in the syllabus were a bit more nuanced.
January 27, 2018
Nelly, a grotesque and evil fairy queen and her minions, a mass of identical rat-like creatures known collectively as the Vodi, wreak havoc on humanity. But Nelly and the Vodi exist only in the youthful imaginations of Dick Corvey and his friend, Tom. Nelly and the Vodi were invented so that Dick and Tom could make sense of life's mysteries. Strangely, Nelly and the Vodi don’t survive Dick and Tom’s transition to adulthood, something that happens early in the novel. Instead, the focus of the bulk of the novel is on Dick's personal tragedies in post-war Britain.
The weakness of this book is that Dick Corvey is interchangeable with the other cynics that make up the male population of this book. Only the women were given unique personalities.
Otherwise, it's well-written and engaging. It adds to the documentation of British life before and after World War II. We get to see harsh school discipline and fire and brimstone preaching that were more prevalent during that period.
For parents, I'd rate it PG for sexual situations.
3 stars
The weakness of this book is that Dick Corvey is interchangeable with the other cynics that make up the male population of this book. Only the women were given unique personalities.
Otherwise, it's well-written and engaging. It adds to the documentation of British life before and after World War II. We get to see harsh school discipline and fire and brimstone preaching that were more prevalent during that period.
For parents, I'd rate it PG for sexual situations.
3 stars
December 30, 2014
I’ve read a couple of John Braine books just for the namesake. But The Vodi sits just below my favourite book, The Wasp Factory, in a top ten by John Harrison*. I started this book about 5 years ages and have only read it off and on. Not being as convenient as Audiobooks or Kindle books, it only got read when I was sick or on holidays. But I finished it at last!
The Vodi is an imaginary race of childhood creatures conjured up between two school friends, Tom and Dick (amazingly there’s a Harry in the book too), which have a continued presence into their adult life by representing the bearers of bad luck. You know the way some some people get the best jobs despite being incompetent, and the best girls despite being dickheads? Well that’s the essence of this novel.
Dick is as much the protagonist of this book as every Country & Western song; he’s lost his youth, his job, his health and his girl. And he spends dark days in a hospital bed suffering with TB and damning the Vodi for taking his life away.
For someone who doesn’t get on too well with older books, I found this quite enjoyable and interesting, and it dated extremely well for a book that’s 55 years old – my copy still has the price on the front of Three and Sixpence, or 3 Shillings and six, or something like that, I’m not sure.. .answers on a postcard please.
*though I’ve no idea who John Harrison is.
The Vodi is an imaginary race of childhood creatures conjured up between two school friends, Tom and Dick (amazingly there’s a Harry in the book too), which have a continued presence into their adult life by representing the bearers of bad luck. You know the way some some people get the best jobs despite being incompetent, and the best girls despite being dickheads? Well that’s the essence of this novel.
Dick is as much the protagonist of this book as every Country & Western song; he’s lost his youth, his job, his health and his girl. And he spends dark days in a hospital bed suffering with TB and damning the Vodi for taking his life away.
For someone who doesn’t get on too well with older books, I found this quite enjoyable and interesting, and it dated extremely well for a book that’s 55 years old – my copy still has the price on the front of Three and Sixpence, or 3 Shillings and six, or something like that, I’m not sure.. .answers on a postcard please.
*though I’ve no idea who John Harrison is.
March 4, 2025
enjoy this wayyuyyyy more than I was expecting. a character disseminating his life on his (apparent) deathbed trying to figure out where did it all go wrong? and if so, who is to blame?
is misanthropy just making yourself a victim and self pitying ?! the answer to everything is love
is misanthropy just making yourself a victim and self pitying ?! the answer to everything is love
December 1, 2011
Dick Corvey is a young man who has lost everything. He had a job, a girl and his youthful health. Now he is confined to a sanatorium, dying from T.B. Flashbacks reveal how, as a child, Dick and his pal Tom believed in The Vodi, an army of tunnel dwelling devils that took orders from Nelly. When Nelly took a dislike to someone for whatever reason, the Vodi made them suffer.
Looking back with bitterness, Dick decides that the Vodi were onto him. As he surprisingly starts to recover, he becomes infatuated with one of his nurses and dares to dream of a better life.
The Vodi is completely different to Room at the Top (although Braine can't resist mentioning the Lamptons!) and is an interesting examination of a man wondering whether he can face life struggling against adversity or if he should just give up.
Looking back with bitterness, Dick decides that the Vodi were onto him. As he surprisingly starts to recover, he becomes infatuated with one of his nurses and dares to dream of a better life.
The Vodi is completely different to Room at the Top (although Braine can't resist mentioning the Lamptons!) and is an interesting examination of a man wondering whether he can face life struggling against adversity or if he should just give up.
July 21, 2016
John Braines' success after his first Room at the Top was not to be sustained with this second book. I can't help thinking that the title had something to do with it. It's at first sight a story about "The Vodi" a race of ferret faced troublemakers. Really it's a tale about post-war Britain and more specifically Dick Corvey's battle against TB and attempts to find his place in the sobering economic reality of lower middle class Britain. John Braine's gritty social realism are the best parts of this book which deserves a little more recognition than it garnered at the time or since despite a slight tendency to misogny which runs through his narrative. Recently reprinted by Valancourt Books
May 29, 2013
Well written, and with some great descriptions of characters and places, but the story doesn't go anywhere, and the gloom and hopelessness of it all gets a bit tiring.
October 21, 2013
Read it again after many years; was as fresh as it was then. Great novel.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews