Face of the Waters

The First-Born of Egypt #2

by Simon Raven

This is the second volume of Simon Raven's ‘First Born of Egypt' series. Marius Stern, the wayward son of Gregory Stern, has survived earlier escapades and is safely back at prep school – assisted by his father's generous contribution to the school's new shooting range. Fielding Gray and Jeremy Morrison are returning home via Venice, where they encounter the friar, Piero, an ex-male whore and a figure from a shared but distant past. Back in England, at the Wiltshire family home, Lord Canteloupe is restless. He finds his calm disturbed by the arrival of Piero; Jeremy's father's threat to saddle his son with the responsibility of the family estate; and the dramatic resistance of Gregory Stern to attempted blackmail.

Genres: Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

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

[Chiefdonkey Bradey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A louche dreamworld, cads, schemers, innocents

[Doug · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5, rounded up.

A direct continuation on from the first volume in this series, The Morning Star (1), with many of the dangling threads from that tome coming together here. Although there were a few longueurs towards the end, and the ending itself stretched the bounds of probability particularly with the bizarre crucifixion of Gregory Stern by pro-Arab factions!, I am actually liking this sequel as much, if not more, than the original 'Alms for Oblivion.

As with the first volume, I hadn't a clue what the title referred to, but in Googling, discovered it probably refers to Proverbs 27:19: "As water reflects the face, so one’s heart reflects the man" - which makes a kind of sense.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

I cannot quite tell if this is a profound book about the human condition or merely a profoundly terrible piece of writing, and it is possibly both.

In its defence, there are some set-pieces that are superb: Gregory Stern's confrontation with the (?) PLO men is beautifully written, a man finally finding out where he needs to take a stand, whatever the consequences; the final piece in the Torcello church, which is bizarrely reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's The Waves (if The Waves was about mother and daughter incest - which, as far as I know, it might be); the exploration of the nature of God's atonement through the crucifixion; the scenes where Fielding Gray is worrying about HMRC possibly bankrupting him (which any freelancer will recognise).

But:
This may be a bugbear of mine, but this book is largely unintelligible without having read the previous one (Morning Star): unlike his brilliant Alms for Oblivion series, which can be read in any order (though The Survivors is very definitely the last one), this is very clearly a sequel, and anyone picking it up without having read the first will be largely baffled.
The problem is we don't really care about any of the characters. Whereas in Alms to Oblivion, we want to know about the characters, and their motivations, though occasionally oblique, normally perverted, often odious, certainly morally reprehensible, are fascinating; in this the characters behave in ways that make no sense, and the central mystery, involving the disappearance of a spoilt, entitled, manipulative, unattractive brat of a character (a sort of junior Boris Johnson, but without any of the superficial charm) which so energises everyone in the novel, is unfathomable to the reader (certainly to this one).
Another issue is: I know this is the 1970s, but did no one care about incest and child molestation in those days? The revelation about a mother sexually abusing her eight-year-old daughter makes people go "Oh, that makes sense"; the creepy uncle, about whom everyone knows, is welcomed into the house with the thirteen year old girls, just vaguely policed; a ten year old boy is allowed to go on holiday with a man with a long history of pederasty. I know things were different then, but....
A lot of the dialogue feels like it could have been spoken by anyone: there is a unity of tonality that suggests he is more interested in the ideas than the people saying it. Or just he couldn't be bothered to revise it.
And when a character fails to react when her husband of 30 years is found horrifically murdered is baffling: I get it that she has just started a mid-life lesbian relationship, but even so?

Wikipedia (the font of all slightly inaccurate information) says that this series was written "for the money" (and why not? most books are), but Raven seems to have lost something important. Most of us read books for character, and development. In Alms for Oblivion, Raven had this is spades. In this book, he has kind of forgotten it. Pity.

[Kiri Johnston · Rating 3 out of 5]

This second sequence - and some might say all of Alms for Oblivion - is like a big, expensive pile of spew. It’s mostly disgusting, feels off and isn’t great to look at; a confusing, convoluted mess of ideas and rich-drunk philosophy, yet, despite all of that, I love it. Because just like spew there are a few currants of real wisdom and heart, and those are the things you focus on - the remnants of a meal cooked with talent, eaten with a little too much gusto. The central message here, once extracted from a great gust of nonsense, is one I have to respect: that every part of life should be enjoyed, disgust should be savored and the best aspects of humanity are often the most disgusting ones.

[Marie Bouteille · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quirky characters with a quirky sense of humour on a quirky adventure in Britain and Italy