Simon Raven | Thornfield Hall

This says Book 5, but it is 2 in my Vintage omnibus,

After my recent reading of Simon Raven’s satiric novel, The Rich Pay Late, the first in a 10-book series, Alms for Oblivion, I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue right away. I had enjoyed it mildly, but hadn’t loved it.

But Friends in Low Places (1965) the second novel, utterly won me over, and I am telling friends it is a “work of genius,” a pompous phrase I seldom use. This hilarious novel proved to me that Raven is a brilliant writer. The characterization is deeper and at the same time funnier, though Raven also shares the dark side of crime and blackmail.

We meet old and new characters in this Trollopeian comedy. The board of Stix, a prestigious commerce magazine, continues to jockey for power and position, but the plot this time revolves around a purloined letter that will affect Parliament if it gets out. Copies abound, blackmail is rampant, and the MPs need this top secret letter repressed.

The letter particularly concerns Lord Cantaloupe, a pompous, bossy, but practical man who is very funny. In the 1950s, some members of the Cabinet, including Cantaloupe, colluded secretly with Israel and France to invade Egypt if it became necessary, and all this is in the letter. Nothing came of it, but if released it would cause a scandal. And it is unfortunate that Mark Lewson, a charming young con man, has acquired the letter and the means to blackmail Cantalope with a copy, while agreeing to sell the orginal letter to the suave but even less scrupulous Somerset Lloyd-James, editor of Stix, who is prepared to get really nasty.

Cantaloupe can take care of himself, that is, if he is allowed to do things himself. But what could be funnier than his visiting Westward Ho!, a government-sponsored campground, planned by him in conjunction with gay (or queer?) Canton Weir, to attract working-class outdoors types on holiday, only to find the trailers are on their last legs/wheels, with broken steps, trashed carpets, and showers that don’t work? Cantaloupe takes charge and commands all the lazy workers he can dredge up to make the place presentable. But they end up hiring actors to stay in the trailers for the publicity shots, because the place is such a mess they daren’t let the public near it.

And, just so you’ll know, two characters who are writers and also good men (!), as opposed to the villainous Lloyd-James, play a great part in detecting the whereabouts of the purloined letter. Mark Llewellyn has to postpone his honeymoon because of his sister-in-law’s indiscretion (she’s rather like Lydia in Pride and Prejudice, only shockingly immoral: Lydia is just silly), and Fielding Grey, my new favorite character, a writer based loosely on the author, looks grotesque due to a missing eye and a strange pink face (plastic surgery after whatever took out his eye), but has learned one or two military tricks that come in handy.

This is a fantastically witty, Waughish read, but it may be better to read the first book first. Or is it? Anyway, I loved this.

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.