Kingsley Amis is one of those authors whose names I'm aware of, but about whose books I know nothing at all. Plus I have a tendency to mix him up with his son Martin, who falls into the same category. My preconceptions here were minimal.
Well, that's not entirely true. Having read the dust jacket blurb, I was fairly sure that The Old Devils would fall into what I think of -- rather depressingly -- as the Booker Prize Pattern: middle aged white people contemplate their mortality. (The secondary Pattern: coming-of-age in a poor country.) And to a large extent it does. The book follows a group of elderly friends from a Welsh town, and how their relationships and everyday routines are changed when two of them move back to the town after living in England. It doesn't sound like my sort of book, and I did initially find it very difficult to get into, but once I'd been introduced to all the characters and become accustomed to the style of story-telling, I actually enjoyed it quite a lot.
In large part this was because of how carefully and unflinchingly each person was written -- each one the sum of their flaws, and the more painful parts of their history. I didn't like most of them much, and often that spoils a book for me, but here it just filled me with admiration at the understanding of human nature and the well-tuned ear for prose that created these characters. The self-important, self-deprecating, utterly self-centred poet Alan was particularly delightful to read about, because Amis's structuring of the book to switch between everyone's points of view allowed you to see him as others did, and so to laugh at him when he was being most unlikable in his own voice. I always admire it when writers can use multiple-character perspectives to provide this kind of depth of character portrayal, and Amis does it very well.
The most interesting aspect of reading the book, for me, was not a property of the book itself, but rather a fact arising from the particular context of me reading it. The characters are older than the protagonists of most books I read, and convincingly old, and it's incredible how alien I found their fixations and internal narratives, from the perspective of my own 24 years. Before starting the book I'd found a mention of it in a sort of enjoyable lazy non-fiction memoir-of-a-life-in-books by Susan Hill, Howard's End is on the Landing. Hill said of The Old Devils that it was a way for Amis to talk about and confront his greatest fears, and holding that idea in my mind was a way in which I got more out of the book than I otherwise would have. Because, let's face it, I don't have it in me to viscerally recognise the fears of advancing age; the doublethink required to fixate on and repress frightening bodily symptoms; the greyness of perusing history and knowing it to be too late to change anything important; the mess and pointlessness of a routine entrenched in bitterness, or alcoholism, or resignation. I can read them and let them create a picture -- a good one -- in my mind. I can feel the fear, a tinge of it, on the pages. But it's not my fear and so it's not my story.
The book also has a lot to say about Wales and Welshness, and I was left again with the impression that for a lot of people the book would have sparked smiles at injokes, and feelings of recognition. As an outsider I wasn't left with a particular sense of what makes Welsh people Welsh (except for, it seems, truly epic amounts of alcohol consumption); if that was something Amis was trying to accomplish, then it failed for me, but I didn't get the impression that he was trying. I just don't think this book was written, at all, for people like me. Reading it was like reading a work in another language when one has a very serviceable grasp of the grammar and the vocabulary, but lacks the deep understanding of syntax and idiom and context that a native speaker might possess. Maybe I wouldn't need to be Welsh for this book to speak to me on more than a rational level. Maybe I'd just need to be closer to the fear.
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