The Old Devils
by Kingsley Amis
Summary
Alun and Rhiannon Weaver come home to south Wales after decades in London, where Alun has made a good living as a professional Welshman, broadcasting and lecturing on a poet who is very obviously meant to be Dylan Thomas. Waiting for them is a circle of old friends who have stayed, and who have spent their retirement drinking with tremendous dedication: the men who drink at the Bible and Crown from opening time, the women at Gwen's over white wine from mid morning.
Alun's return reopens everything. He slept with most of the wives forty years ago and sees no reason not to renew the arrangement, and his old friends admire him, resent him and see through him in constantly shifting proportions.
Amis is merciless about ageing and specific about drinking in a way few novelists manage: the mechanics of it, the timing, the self justification, the physical cost. The comedy is continuous and the target is usually vanity.
Underneath, and this is the surprise from a writer with his reputation, there is real tenderness, particularly toward the marriages that have survived. It runs long and the cast takes a while to separate. Readers who know Lucky Jim should expect something slower, sadder and considerably better.
The Welsh setting is specific and affectionate rather than decorative, and the several couples take a hundred pages to separate in the mind. Best for readers who enjoy Barbara Pym's later novels or who want the rare thing of a comic novel about being old.
Historical Context & Significance
The Old Devils won the Booker Prize in 1986 and was reported at the time as a rare openly comic winner, a framing that returned when Howard Jacobson took the 2010 prize with the first comic novel to win since The Old Devils.
The result surprised people twice over. Comic fiction was not thought to be prize material, and Kingsley Amis was at sixty four generally assumed to be past his best, having spent two decades being better known for his opinions than his novels. His son Martin Amis considered it his father's finest book.
The novel is now read as the strongest thing in Amis's late period and as an unexpectedly humane portrait of old age from a writer more usually accused of the opposite. It was adapted for television in 1992.