The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis

First published: 1986

Type of work: Novel of character

Time of work: The mid-1980’s

Locale: South Wales

Principal Characters:

• Alun Weaver, a poet, television personality, and man of letters
• Rhiannon Weaver, his wife, once the lover of Peter Thomas
• Muriel Thomas, a Yorkshirewoman living in Wales
• Peter Thomas, her husband, a retired chemical engineer
• Malcolm Cellan-Davies, a retired insurance agent and amateur poet
• Gwen Cellan-Davies, his wife, once the lover of Alun Weaver
• Sophie Norris, another former lover of Alun Weaver
• Charlie Norris, her husband, part-owner of the Owen Glendower hotel
• Tarquin Jones, landlord of the Bible and Crown pub

The Novel

The event which opens The Old Devils is Malcolm Cellan-Davies’ receipt of the news that Alun and Rhiannon Weaver are intending to leave London and return to their old home and their old circle of friends in South Wales. This news is both welcome and unwelcome. Its welcome aspect is that the Weavers will bring a breath of life to what has become a stagnating environment. Alun Weaver is good company, an engaging talker to his men friends, still an attractive figure to their wives, and, moreover, a man with the glamour of celebrity. His wife, Rhiannon, was clearly a great beauty in youth, still regretted by Peter Thomas (with whom she once had an unlucky affair ending in abortion), still admired more platonically by Malcolm. Their arrival is accordingly looked forward to with excitement by almost all.

On the other hand, the Weavers also pose a series of threats. They threaten several marriages, through Peter’s continuing infatuation with Rhiannon, Sophie Norris’ readiness to restart an affair with Alun, and Gwen Cellan-Davies’ anger over having been jilted or rejected. Alun’s behavior also endangers the cohesion of the entire group of friends. Through the main body of the novel, there is a sense of strain beneath what seems to be a perfectly humdrum sequence of events, as this mixed and shifting group of old people entertain one another, have dinner together, go on excursions, and attend such innocuous public ceremonies as the unveiling of a local statue.

Yet the surface of slightly bored conviviality is never quite ruptured, in spite of occasional conflicts. Gwen abuses Alun at a party, Malcolm is not very seriously assaulted by strangers in a pub, Peter and Rhiannon attempt to clear up their former relationship: All these are smoothed over; nothing goes any further. More serious is the sudden but not unexpected breakdown of Charlie Norris, who is known to be pathologically afraid of the dark. After Alun has given him a manuscript to read, Charlie—pressed for his honest opinion—declares honestly that it is worthless. In revenge, Alun engineers things so that Charlie is left to walk down an unlit road by himself at night, with predictable results. Even this betrayal, though, while recognized by Charlie and the others, is forgiven.

Ironically, the one event in the novel which does precipitate change is not Alun’s arrival but his wholly unexpected death from a heart attack shortly after being expelled, with his friends, from their favorite pub. The expulsion, the reader is told carefully, did not precipitate the heart attack. This could have come at any time, and there is no moral or logic behind it. Though Alun’s death itself is “just one of those things,” however, it sets up a reshuffle and, perhaps, a new happiness. Muriel decides to return home to Yorkshire. Her husband Peter refuses to go with her and moves in instead with the now-widowed Rhiannon. The new union between the families is oddly cemented by the marriage of Rhiannon’s daughter to Peter’s son. There is a feeling overall that even in Peter and Rhiannon’s old age, a new beginning can be and has been made.

The Characters

The main fact about all the main characters is that they are old, seemingly between sixty and seventy. The embarrassments of age are a main part of the story. Malcolm is secretly but obsessively worried about his teeth and his bowels. Charlie (along with most of the other characters, but to a greater extent) keeps going by blotting out much of the outside world with drink. Peter is in an even worse position than either, having allowed himself, in despair and disappointment with his failed marriage, to become grossly fat—so fat, the reader is told, that dressing has become a daily problem; even a simple matter such as cutting his own toenails has become virtually insoluble. As far as the reader can tell, only Alun, of the four principal male characters, remains potent, and though this is a psychological as well as a physical matter, it is made clear that age makes everything, from toenails to sexuality, more difficult, while at the same time it tends continually to shut down one’s options.

A side effect is that character in a way becomes more pronounced. Young people may change, or learn, or succeed, or at least entertain comforting illusions about themselves. Old people are likely on the one hand to know themselves better and on the other hand to be more set in their ways, and thus more transparent to others. The reader is given engaging pictures accordingly of Malcolm slowly realizing why it is that he has always been socially unpopular: He dresses badly, he says what others are thinking, but at times, when they recognize the virtue of silence, he has a fatal lack of empathy (bred, perhaps, by his lack of skill as a social observer). He means well but performs badly. By contrast, Muriel has turned into a sadistic nagger, adept only at breaking the spirit of her husband, while Rhiannon is presented as in a way the converse of Malcolm, socially adept where he is inept, and physically attractive where he is not, but (to a degree which only she recognizes) without personal opinions or interests, dependent on others for stimulation and support. One might believe that The Old Devils is a sequence of “variations on inadequacy,” and this is true. The galling truth which Kingsley Amis presents, though, is that inadequacy is normal. Age only brings it out—fortunately, at the same time, robbing it of much of its sexual or social sting.

Even the book’s dominating character, Alun, has obvious areas of failure and weakness. One is signaled by his name. Was he really called “Alun” from birth? his friends ask. The answer is no. His real name is Alan, the normal but English form. He has respelled it in exactly the same way that Welsh cabranks are now labeled “tacsi”—not because “taxi” would be unfamiliar to any Welshman but to make a point simply of being Welsh. Being Welsh is part of Alun’s stock-in-trade as a poet and personality, as is his devotion to imitating and explaining the local poet “Brydan.” The dangers are, first, that being Welsh is much more successful as an attention-getter in London than in Wales, and, second, that using this continually as an attention-getter diminishes one’s real response to the experience. Alun is therefore continually afraid that he may be turning into a charlatan. At the same time, he fears that for all of his sexual potency, he may be losing literary creativity—hence the violence and meanness of his revenge on Charlie. These fears coexist with an undeniable private honesty, generosity, charm of manner, and short way with other poseurs. One can see, however, again ironically, that just as the other characters fear the impact of Alun on them, so Alun fears the force of their collective judgment on him. It is perhaps a mercy that he dies suddenly, before that judgment finds a voice.

Critical Context

The Old Devils is Amis’ seventeenth novel, but the first to win a major award, the Booker Prize for the best British novel of 1986. The judges’ decision merely adds force to a general awareness that Amis has been the most consistently successful novelist in Great Britain for more than thirty years, distinguished by his variety of themes and modes and by his combination of humor and underlying seriousness. Critical as opposed to popular recognition has, however, been withheld by Amis’ scorn for established values, which has led him on the one hand to write genre fiction such as The Riverside Villas Murder (1973, a detective story) or The Alteration (1976, an alternate world story), and on the other to explore such unpopular themes as old age, in his novel Ending Up (1974), or antifeminism, most notably in Stanley and the Women (1984).

One may say also that Amis has consistently flouted the strongest conventions of fiction and has done so successfully. It is a strong if unstated assumption that novels must contain young people, because young people are more interesting and their lives more eventful, and novels have to rely on events. It is the main achievement of this novel to have challenged both assumptions and for Amis to have produced a work which holds the attention without either the glamour of youth or the excitement of contrived events. The Old Devils is a pure novel of character, which succeeds through mastery of conversation and through depth and breadth of sympathy.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. LXXXIII, December 1, 1986, p. 529.

Books and Bookmen. October, 1986, p. 32.

The Christian Science Monitor. LXXIX, March 20, 1987, p. 22.

Contemporary Review. CCL, January, 1987, p. 45.

The Economist. CCCI, October 18, 1986, p. 96.

Gardner, Philip. Kingsley Amis, 1981.

Gohn, Jack B. Kingsley Amis: A Checklist, 1976.

The Guardian Weekly. CXXXV, November 2, 1986, p. 21.

Illustrated London News. CCLXXIV, December, 1986, p. 64.

Kirkus Reviews. LV, January 1, 1987, p. 2.

Library Journal. CXII, February 1, 1987, p. 90.

Listener. CXVI, October 16, 1986, p. 22.

London Review of Books. VIII, September 18, 1986, p. 12.

Maclean’s. XCIX, November 10, 1986, p. 70.

The New Republic. CXCVI, March 30, 1987, p. 33.

New Statesman. CXII, September 19, 1986, p. 29.

The New York Review of Books. XXXIV, March 26, 1987, p. 15.

The New York Times. CXXXIV, February 25, 1987, p. 20.

The New York Times Book Review. XCII, March 22, 1987, p. 14.

The Observer. September 14, 1986, p. 27.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXI, January 16, 1987, p. 63.

Punch. CCXCI, September 24, 1986, p. 77.

Salwak, Dale. Kingsley Amis: Writer as Moralist, 1974.

The Spectator. CCLVII, September 13, 1986, p. 31.

Time. CXXIX, March 9, 1987, p. 77.

The Times Literary Supplement. September 12, 1986, p. 994.

USA Today. V, March 6, 1987, p. 7D.

The Village Voice Literary Supplement. March, 1987, p. 3.

The Wall Street Journal. CCIX, March 20, 1987, p. 9.