Do people ever really grow up? The old devils in this book are just as they have always been, but trapped in a slowly aging body. It's like living in a house that needs repair, but the repairman never comes. When Alun Weaver and his wife, Rhiannon, a famous beauty in her day, move into a quiet retirement community, they find it peopled by friends from former days. Suddenly all the ambitions and energies, overgrown like weeds with years, burst out afresh. In Amis' hands the results are predictably funny. Amis received the Booker Prize, Britian's highest literary honor, in 1986 for THE OLD DEVILS.
Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils , which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining, reminiscing, and, above all, drinking. This more or less orderly social world is thrown off-kilter, however, when two old friends unexpectedly return from England: Alun Weaver, now a celebrated man of Welsh letters, and his entrancing wife, Rhiannon. Long-dormant rivalries and romances are rudely awakened, as life at the Bible and Crown, the local pub, is changed irrevocably.
Considered by Martin Amis to be Kingsley Amis’s greatest achievement—a book that “stands comparison with any English novel of the [twentieth] century”— The Old Devils confronts the attrition of ageing with rare candor, sympathy, and moral intelligence.
Description:
Do people ever really grow up? The old devils in this book are just as they have always been, but trapped in a slowly aging body. It's like living in a house that needs repair, but the repairman never comes. When Alun Weaver and his wife, Rhiannon, a famous beauty in her day, move into a quiet retirement community, they find it peopled by friends from former days. Suddenly all the ambitions and energies, overgrown like weeds with years, burst out afresh. In Amis' hands the results are predictably funny. Amis received the Booker Prize, Britian's highest literary honor, in 1986 for THE OLD DEVILS.
Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils , which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining, reminiscing, and, above all, drinking. This more or less orderly social world is thrown off-kilter, however, when two old friends unexpectedly return from England: Alun Weaver, now a celebrated man of Welsh letters, and his entrancing wife, Rhiannon. Long-dormant rivalries and romances are rudely awakened, as life at the Bible and Crown, the local pub, is changed irrevocably.
Considered by Martin Amis to be Kingsley Amis’s greatest achievement—a book that “stands comparison with any English novel of the [twentieth] century”— The Old Devils confronts the attrition of ageing with rare candor, sympathy, and moral intelligence.