After reading Simon Raven’s spicy novel, The Rich Pay Late, the first in a 10-book series, Alms for Oblivion, we remember the scandals we read in tabloids in line at the supermarket.  Raven’s characters are flamboyantly dissipated: they deal in vicious gossip, back-stabbing, betrayal, nymphomania, orgies, adultery, drunkenness, and Machiavellian manipulation.  If you take the less savory characters of Aldous Huxley, Anthony Powell, Kingsley Amis, and Anthony Burgess and hurl them into one book, you will be in Raven’s world

The plot of The Rich Pay Late revolves around Jude Holbrook’s outrageous scheme to buy and take over the management of a magazine, Strix.   He and his business partner, dull, clueless Donald Salinger, are proprietors of a firm that prints high-class advertisements. When Holbrook tries to persuade Salinger to buy the magazine Strix for 70,000 pounds, Salinger in exasperation asks what they have to do with the magazine business.   Salinger claims it will further their advertising interests: he describes Strix (whch means screech-owl or harpie), as “a high-class journal of commerce and … therefore a good place for prestige advertising…”  

 The characters are roughly divided into old boys from prestigious schools and new men and women clawing their way up the social ladder. Salinger is an old  school chum of Somerset Lloyd-James, the editor of Strix, and who better to persuade the board of the magazine to sell?

I have to say, I’ve seldom met a more shocking bunch of people.  Yes, it’s funny in a way, but everybody is out to get something from someone.  Vanessa Drew, a wild woman who goes in for orgies, tones down her flamboyance to marry Salinger and becomes a power behind the scenes, who is strongly in favor of buying Strix. 

She also manages to piss off people she has never liked. Parties and balls are excellent ways to show off your wealth, so malicious Vanessa hires two butler/bouncers and gives orders not to let anyone in without the printed  invitation.  Soon there are fifty or more guests crowded like a lynch mob outside, because hardly anyone brought their invitations. Vanessa maliciously watches the whole scne, and does nothing about it, though Salinger soon clears it up.  Still, one of the women guests clogs up all the toilets in revenge.

Fortunately, there are two honorable characters, Tom Llewellyn, a drunk but extremely talented writer, and Peter Morrison, an MP and a member of the board of Strix.  Because Tom is drunk out of his mind, he passes on career-killing gossip about Peter Morrison after insulting Morrison’s wife.  The next day, he realizes what he said, and clears Peter’s name by inviting a reporter from a trashy paper to help him learn what really happened.  They discover from a priest that Peter Morrison had not been involved in the scandal at all. and then Llewellyn apologized to Morrison, and the two shake hands.

Without his exchange between two honorable frenemies, I might not have continued reading the series.  We have to have some hope in this evil world, don’t we? And somebody out there has integrity. Raven’s writing is good, if not great, yet the satire is so over-the-top that it made me nostalgic for Rabelais’s Pantagruel and Gargantua. And isn’t Rabelais better really?

According to the obit in The Guardian, Raven had a motley career. He was kicked out of school for gay sex, but fortunately was accepted at Cambridge because no one cared what he did in bed.  He served in the military, was married, had one son, and got divorced, wrote novels, memoirs, plays, and for TV (remember The Pallisers?), and I am sure he gathered material for his writing in his spare time.

Not for everybody, but this short novel is perfect in its unique way. Still, Raven’s way (Raven’s Way sounds like a Gothic novel, doesn’t it?) might not be for everyone.

I, however, look forward to reading more by Raven.