The Rich Pay Late

Alms for Oblivion #4

by Simon Raven

280pages. poche. Broché.

Genres: Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Simon Arthur Noël Raven (28 December 1927 – 12 May 2001) was an English novelist, essayist, dramatist and raconteur who, in a writing career of forty years, caused controversy, amusement and offence. His obituary in The Guardian noted that, "he combined elements of Flashman, Waugh's Captain Grimes and the Earl of Rochester", and that he reminded Noel Annan, his Cambridge tutor, of the young Guy Burgess.

Among the many things said about him, perhaps the most quoted was that he had "the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel". E W Swanton called Raven's cricket memoir Shadows on the Grass "the filthiest cricket book ever written". He has also been called "cynical" and "cold-blooded", his characters "guaranteed to behave badly under pressure; most of them are vile without any pressure at all". His unashamed credo was "a robust eighteenth-century paganism....allied to a deep contempt for the egalitarian code of post-war England"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_R...

Reviews

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

After a rather disappointing detour into the espionage antics of the 3rd volume in Raven's opus (The Sabre Squadron), we are more or less back on track with this - which was the first written of his 'Alms for Oblivion' series, but the 4th chronologically -which is how I'm reading them. Rather than one main character, as in the other novels, this is more of a hodge-podge with a wide-ranging plethora of characters, some of whom reoccur in other of the series. Taking place against the backdrop of the 1956 Suez Canal fiasco, the plot centers around two blokes who run a moderately successful advertising agency, attempting to buy controlling interest in a Conservative-leaning political magazine. Most of the characters, with the exclusion of stalwart Peter Morrison, are fairly vile specimens - but all the more entertaining for being so. Like the previous volume, I raced through this is less than 24 hours, and will move on to # 5.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first encounter with Simon Raven’s caddish and pungent ten novel sequence, Alms for Oblivion, came some thirty years ago. I can’t remember now how I came across it (although I can clearly recall the vivid cover illustrations in the paperback edition then available) but having read the first book I was hooked and read them all in the space of a year. It was a formative reading experience and the urge to revisit the series has now become so strong that I have succumbed. They are currently available in a three part Vintage omnibus edition, which will ensure a different reading experience to the first time as they are arranged by date of publication rather than in chronological order of plot, which is how I experienced them before.
I think of Alms for Oblivion as the seedy, disreputable cousin of Anthony Powell’s rather more polite A Dance to the Music of Time, and, like most disreputable family members is much more fun than the others. The Rich Pay Late is a tale of duplicitous business dealings in raffish high society in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956, and in it we meet for the first time, two characters - Somerset Lloyd-James and Peter Morrison (clearly based on members of Raven’s circle, William Rees-Mogg and James (Jim) Prior) who will feature throughout the sequence. Lloyd-James in particular is a particularly sharp and entertaining portrait of a priggish and cutthroat young man on the make. The Rich Pay Late is an excellent hors d’oeuvre for the series - if, that is, your appetite runs to fraud, blackmail, Machiavellian politics, sudden violent death, multiple adultery, boozing and general seediness.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The scene is London in the fifties. Down from the University, the ambiguous young men, feeling their way through the world of politics, journalism and business, have still not discarded the old but less useful friends of their youth. The problem for the intelligent but less well off is money and, for those with capital, how to keep it and their friends.

"An honourable young member of Parliament is being pressed to join the board of a weekly journal. By fair means or foul...

"(This is the first novel, see my footnote *1 below, in the) 'Alms For Oblivion'...series of novels, all telling separate stories but...linked...by the characters...soldiers, dons, men of business, politicians, writers and plain shits...drawn, in the main, from the upper and upper-middle classes...One aim is to portray both th(eir) weaknesses and strengths...and...to explain their failure to fit into modern Britain along with their curious alacrity to survive and profit...". From the flyleaf of the 1964 hardback edition in the uniform edition.

The first volume (again see my footnote *1 below) of Simon Raven's ten volume 'Alms for Oblivion' series is one of the better novels he wrote and also set out his ambitions for the series. He never said so (at least in print) but many of his early readers and reviewers saw it as a rival to Anthony Powell's 'Dance to the Music of Time' series (for non UK and even younger UK readers I advise googling Powell which I apologise for but if I explain this review will be ridiculously long) or even Anthony Trollope's 'Parliamentary' novels (now usually referred to as his 'Palliser' novels). Alms for Obivion also could be compared to the 'Strangers and Brothers' series of novels by C.P. Snow (now there is a reputation that has collapsed and I am sure will never rise again). But even in its beginnings Alms for Oblivion never rivalled the work of Trollope, Powell or Snow as either 'roman a clef' or 'state of the nation' novels. Indeed Raven after writing the first three volumes largely abandoned the attempt at portraying a broad canvas of UK politics and society and concentrated on portraying things through the eyes of Fielding Gray and his adventures. Well written and amusing though these later volumes are they are no way a portrait of the rich powerful in post WWII UK.

The Rich Pay Late is set in the 1950s an era that Raven knew as it was the period he launched his career as a writer. Unfortunately the 1950s in the UK was vastly different from the same period in the USA. There the template for the future, for good or bad, was being forged in art, literature, film and TV (barely making an impact in the UK for another decade). In the UK it was a time of, largely, stagnant bitterness as the class Raven wrote about coped with creeping destitution and the decay of the UK's importance and power. The Rich Pay Late attempts to portray Britain's betters both as 'better' but also in all their hypocrisy. In this the Alms for Oblivion novels are very much an object of 1960s irreverence and the challenge to authority that came post the Profumo Affair (again I suggest Googling it). But while benefiting from it Raven was never really part of those changes. His increasing lack of connection with or even understanding of how Britain was changing is clear in the later volumes and most particularly 'The First Born of Egypt' series of novels which carries on from Alms for Oblivion but is bizarrely unrelated to any period of UK history and the characters act and speak in a way that exists nowhere outside Raven's imagination.

So what of this novel? As a presentation of UK society the novel has not aged well, Raven's snobbery is on hold (compared to later volumes) but is still unpleasant for a modern reader but Raven was not unique in this and writers like Ian Fleming and even Evelyn Waugh filled their writings of this period with petulant portrayals the young working class who had apparently too much money and to little deference to their betters. It was meant to be mean spirited and unpleasant and reads that way. Raven tries to be sophisticated and cynical but his inability to write a non-public school character who is not completely revolting in looks and character becomes tiresome though, at the same time ,he is also ruthless in his portrayals of his upper class characters. They are also unpleasant, though they knew how to dress, behave and what wine to order, but while they may not smell from lack of washing their unpleasantness is loud and clear. At the time this novel was written the portrayal of the ruling class as full of morally corrupt and debauched characters was very much in vogue and Raven has filled his novels with broad hints of wickedness and sexual depravity.

But Raven's failure to move beyond hints and nudge-nudge, wink-wink pseudo naughtiness means his novels rarely rise above a Carry On, or Confessions of, film level of debauchery. It quickly lost any shock value and his universally unpleasant characters remained distant and unengaging. But, and this is the big problem with Raven, he writes beautifully and engagingly. This novel and the others in the Alms for Oblivion series are compulsively readable and great fun. I have read them singly and in group volumes over many years. They can be addictive but they are not a great portrait of Britain's upper class though they do reflect the way that class has obsessed so many Britons.

I apologise for the length of this review but I have reviewed a great many novels by Raven and I don't want to repeat myself so I will often refer back to this review. Also there is the question of is Raven a 'gay' writer? Although there is a great deal if hinting and insinuation Raven is never explicit. Readers were meant to think he was as likely to sleep with a beautiful boy as a beautiful girl, like his characters, but there is almost never a time when a character actually is seen with a boy. Raven himself was utterly out of sympathy with gay liberation and although there are 'queer' characters and allusions in the novels it is peripherally and heterosexual characters, and sex, predominate. No reader would fear that being seen reading one of Raven's novels would call into question his straightness.

If you can put your hands on this or any of Raven's early novels I would recommend giving them a chance. They are beautifully written, fun and addictive.

*1 The series has subsequently been renumbered so that the volumes are read chronologically according to the date of the events in the novel rather then according to, as here, the date of publication which, I think, is the better way to read them and actually reads better because Raven's ideas about the series and which direction it would take and the characters that would dominate and/or feature changed as he wrote each volume. Even the tenor of the series altered. The characters and apparent direction of the series of the first three volume changed by volume four which was devoted to the school days of Fielding Gray (and others) who, until then, was a relatively minor character in the first three volumes. In subsequent volumes Fielding comes to dominate the series and those characters from the early volumes that survive become peripheral to Fielding's life, career and adventures. Rearranging the series chronologically makes for far less satisfactory reading and it was probably only post Raven's death in 2001 that that a chronological sequence was imposed when the series was republished.

[Philip Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Rich Pay Late is the first novel in Simon Raven's hugely ambitious ten book sequence, Alms For Oblivion. Although written first, it is the fourth novel in the sequence, chronologically. It examines the lives of a group of upper and upper-middle class individuals in the mid-50s, on the eve of the Suez crisis.
The main thread of the multi-stranded narrative concerns a political scandal. Peter Morrison, MP, has a dark secret in his past which erupts into the present day when he blocks a takeover bid for a political magazine of which he is a board member.
The novel is littered with monstrous characters behaving appallingly, and it's really hard to find anyone to identify with. That said, Tom Llewellyn, a political author who is initially presented as a lazy spendthrift, shows better colours in defence of Morrison, his long-standing friend.
This is a very good book. It has echoes of Powell's Dance to the Music of Time sequence. It's a brief read, at just over 200 pages, but it's packed with incidents, and becomes increasingly hard to put down.
With nine further novels to tackle, it will be interesting to see how Raven develops the stories of his monstrous creations.

[Alex Sarll]

The first book Raven wrote of Alms for Oblivion, but the fourth chronologically, and that's the way I'm reading them. After three novels with clear single protagonists, this is much more of an ensemble piece, and the first time the action has centred on London - a teeming, foggy city, populated by an interlocked cast of grasping bastards, snobbish parvenus, fickle tarts, frustrated spinsters and devious queens. There are one or two decent people, somehow - but they tend to come from outside the city, and it's not as if their virtue earns them any reward. The plot has the intricate, clockwork form of tragedy or farce, and exists somewhere between the two as pretty much everyone sees their grand ambitions cast down, while mostly living to tell the tale. It may only be the fifties, but the tone of greed, corruption and censoriousness lends proceedings a much more modern feel than the first, war-shadowed volumes. Elsewhere, I'm reminded more of an entirely base Iris Murdoch.

[Tony Dowson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simon Raven was a reasonably prolific writer who is now rather unfairly half-forgotten. Not only was he a novelist but also a scriptwriter, most notably credited as writing the screenplays for a couple of Anthony Trollope adaptations as well as Edward and Mrs Simpson and additional dialogue for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It is generally accepted that his greatest achievement was the Alms for Oblivion series of ten novels of which this was the first published volume.

The Rich Pay Late was written in the 1960s but set 10 years earlier just before the Suez Crisis signalled British global influence at an embarrassing end. That sequence of events forms the backdrop to the plot and occasional mention is made of the scoundrel Nasser and his goings on. The main story follows the attempted take-over of a high-minded magazine by an advertising firm run by the sappy but kind-hearted, wealthy Salinger and the aggressive and impecunious ‘upstart’ Holbrook, grappling for influence. Another character, Peter Morrison, an MP who is also on the board of the magazine, becomes the subject of some potentially ruinous gossip when he attempts to thwart the take-over. A large supporting cast give a wider scope, a great babble of voices. The book also documents the bed-hopping of promiscuous characters, some with sexual tastes bordering on the bizarre.

The world is very much Raven’s, following the caddish upper-middle classes of which he was a part. This possibly explains why the novels have fallen into disfavour. Raven doesn’t bother with representations of likeable women – far from it, between the pages they're mostly grasping, selfish and whorish . (This offended the sensibilities of the women on BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read when the book was recommended by Brian Sewell.) Raven doesn’t go down into the gutter to write about monosyllabic working class ‘heroes’ and educate us as to their noble resilience in the midst of their plight. Ken Loach couldn’t and wouldn’t make one of his dreary films adapting it. Written in the 60s, the book does not follow the gobby ‘Angry Young Men’ trend, which supposedly tore away the cobwebs of a repressed age – codswallop I know. They came a little too late to establish Raven in the old order, and they are a little too vulgar and cynical to be read by those who yearn for the good old days.

It has been said that there are some similarities to early Waugh with this book. That is an acceptable comparison so far as Raven trains his satirical eye on the upper-echelons and mercilessly skewers their prejudices. The humour is black. Raven is less outrightly comical than Waugh, though. The characters are less deliberately ‘cardboard cut-out’ as one might encounter in Vile Bodies and Decline and Fall. One learns much of the attitudes of the era from Raven. The snobbishness. The sexual escapades. The financial dealings. The politics. It was, after all, only shortly after the war when this was set, and the Empire was still being dismantled – one should not forget that the it was at its height only 20 to 30 years previously. This was a fascinating time, the 1950s, one when Empire was still alive in the minds of the Brits, and before ghastly popular culture would dig its claws into civilisation.

Raven does not perhaps ascend to the heights of truly great writing with this book. Indeed, Christopher Hitchens called Raven’s series ‘a sort of cheap rate ante-room to the grander sequences of Anthony Powell’. One would be pig-ignorant to read only masterpieces, though. They often tell us little of the era in which they are written. We forgive them the flaws we wouldn’t excuse in lesser writers. I have personally grown a little bored of deeply meaningful writing, clobbering us all over the head with its profundity. Heaven-forfend reading genuine schlock, either, with its poorly drawn characters, dreadful prose, and written with the silly, conventional world views of bovine authors. Raven writes handsomely in comparison. Nimble prose. A healthily cynical attitude. Nothing overly grand. Star-ratings are beside the point.

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Rich Pay Late by Simon Raven

10 out of 10





Ad Maiorem Dei Gloria as Somerset keeps writing in his notes, or to use an oriental imprecation, Alhamdulillah for the fourth volume in the roman fleuve Alms for Oblivion, which has started divinely with Fielding Gray, continuing in the same note with the second part, Sound the Retreat, only to slightly disappoint yours truly with the third section, The Sabre Squadron, wherein Daniel Mond has not been a charming enough hero for this reader, disengaged especially in the last part of the adventure, for the charade of the camouflage of a civilian within an army unit, in order to escape nefarious agents of the crown, bent on stealing mathematical discoveries that would disintegrate organic and other matter, presumably…



Quite a few of the characters from the first two volumes return and they will keep showing in the next installments, Insha’Allah, starting with the loathsome Somerset Lloyd- James, the one that has been a villain in the story of Fielding Grey, whom he more or less blackmailed, now the editor of a reputable business magazine, Strix, the Object of Desire first for another bad personae, perhaps even more so than Lloyd- James, Jude Holbrook, partner in a printing business, but aspiring to a position of even more material affluence – which is a bad idea in some ways, positive psychology recommends time affluence, over the financial one, which is what the under signed has…time, that is, not that much money, alas – and to exert power in more ways than one, and for that desire to be fulfilled, Strix would serve very well, if bought from Lord Philby, and maneuvered in such a way as to promote the interests of ruthless proprietors.

Jude Holbrook is a partner in business with Donald Salinger, a less vicious man than the former, but although his complexity leaves room for generosity, as in the sum allocated to the mother of a defunct employee, he is still plagued by quite a few shortcomings, he represents old money, inherited privilege, in contrast with his business partner, who is more determined, industrious, diligent, if also immoral, vile and self-obsessed – Angela Tuck, also resurrected from the first section of the masterpiece, tells him at one point that everybody is just meat for the selfish, Trumpian, as in like Donald Trump character, and he only cares for himself – and Salinger is blind to the shenanigans, indiscretions or outright orgies in which his girlfriend and soon to be wife, Vanessa Drew, is engaged…the latter is so promiscuous and wild in her intimacies as to have sex with more men – probably if not at the same time, at least one after the other – and eventually, when she becomes pregnant, she is not sure who could be the father and to avoid an embarrassment, a mulatto child, she arranges for an abortion, thus creating the premise for an absurd and amusing encounter with her husband…



Donald Salinger has at his firm a spinster living with her mother, a secretary that entertains some erotic desires involving Holbroock, even the gay Ashley and other men, anxious to get rid of her aging mother, placing her in a home, with the help of the malevolent Jude, anxious to take revenge on older people, because his father is not willing to use his money on the well-off son…when the mother learns that she will be sent off by her daughter, she prophecies that god will pay her for this abomination and indeed, once the woman is single, she goes out to a bar to seek the company of men, takes one home and…she is found dismembered in the woods and when her former boss visits the childless mother to secure a sum for her care, she discovers in a bed his own wife, after she will have had an abortion…



Holbrook is determined to buy Strix and is ready to do anything for that – indeed, he is ready to break any rules and/or people for his nefarious goals – and first he lies to his mother about the fifteen thousand pounds – which would be maybe half a million in the currency of this day – stating that he needs it for the education of his son, when in fact he will use the very large sum for his own purposes, and then he bribes Somerset to secure his support – the latter being a contestant for the number one sop for the biggest monster in this story, whereas he has been champion of devilish means in the first volume – and convinces Donald to rally for the cause, by blackmailing Vanessa, who is sleeping around and if her would be husband has been tolerant for the past antic, he is not so willing to turn a blind eye for present orgies, so if he learns from his associate about the wild happenings of his fiancée, he will be very upset, so she accepts to influence Donald and make him wish the ownership of the magazine.

However, another character from the beginning of Alms for Oblivion http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/09/f... makes a comeback, Peter Morrison, the hero of Sound the Retreat, where he has been almost destroyed by a presumably false accusation of having fathered a child with what we must call today a sex worker and was named a whore in those days, only to be up against a quite similar sexual scandal, which is ready to be thrown in his face by Holbroock, if Morrison, who is now not just a member of parliament, but leader of an important group within the Conservative Party and member of the board of Strix, where he is skeptical of the prospective sale of the magazine, just like another member of the board, and another old acquaintance, the one who eventually had refused the accession to higher knowledge for Fielding Gray, Professor Robert Constable, and the two of them can block the transaction.



A writer and journalist uncovers a story from the past, which involves a girl that had been blind up to the age of sixteen and had become pregnant at about fourteen, giving birth to a child that seems to be presumed to be the son of Morrison, whose family is paying an allowance, on the face of it in order to secure the silence of the family of the victim of what looks like a rape…it appears to have happened ten years ago, but it is the sort of scandal that should end the career of the ascending political leader and the monstrous Holbrook is ready to ruin the man and anybody else standing in his dreams and Will for Power…

There is an important twist here and the study of morality, the implications of the saga are extraordinarily crafted and presented, together with elements of the Suez crisis, which happen in the background, but here and there they become preeminent and important factors in decisions taken by Morrison…the political and historical implications of the end of the British empire are again analyzed, just as in Sound the Retreat http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/09/s... where quite a few of the protagonists where involved in the events that led to the Retreat of the British from India…the fourth volume of Alms for Oblivion is yet another spectacular, ecstatic chapter in a phenomenal Magnum opus

[Corto · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a nutshell: The lifestyles of the Rich and Horrible. Evelyn Waugh, but dirtier.

The subject matter is not my usual fare, so understand that my rating reflects my interest in the subject matter, as opposed to the skill, eloquence and craft that Simon Raven employed in telling it. In regards the latter, he’s a wonderful writer, and eventually got me interested in the machinations of a plot (with a Tolstoyan welter of characters), that frankly, wasn’t very exciting (for me) for about the first ¾ of the story.

However, there were flashes of fascinating insights, interesting characters, and acidic humor, which have convinced me to stick with the “Alms for Oblivion” cycle. (Essentially, I’m only interested in three of the novels in this 10 book series, due to the subject matter in those specific novels. However, I want to read what precedes them for context.)

Unlike some of the other reviewers, I’m not reading these in a “chronological order” for the timeline that exists in the cycle, but rather in the order which Simon Raven wrote them. (It’s more interesting to me to see how the authors mind wanders, rather than have everything told in linear fashion. More surprises that way.)

Wonderfully written. We’ll see how the rest goes, and how far I get. 3 stars for the subject matter, 4 stars for the writing.

[Diana Febry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Half way through I almost gave up on this book because while humorous it paints a very bleak picture of human behaviour but I am pleased I read to the end.
The writer is very skilled at using dark humour and minute observations to bring characters to life. And what a nasty bunch of characters they were, manipulative, greedy and over-sexed and all trying to out manoeuvre one another. Even the secretary was up to no good and came to an unpleasant end. Overall a remarkable social comment.
The book was written in the 1960s but the events took place in the mid 1950s and portrayed the spirit of the era very well.
The writing style was a little dated but allowed the story to flow well while exposing the trickery and double-crossing going on beneath the surface.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

First (1964) in the enormous 'Alms for Oblivion' series, this is an absolute rollicking riot of a novel, full of immoral actions, incident and dialogue, with no fear of its own iconoclasm. Furthermore, it's beautifully written. Max Espley, thank you for introducing me to the world of Simon 'additional dialogue for On Her Majesty's Secret Service' Raven, and for giving me these books. I'd never even heard of him until you. Please remind me once again why you are literary executor of his estate! Perhaps it's because, like Raven, you have "the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel"...

[James Appleyard · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great recommendation and a thoroughly enjoyable read. Populated by a hilariously flawed cast of characters and bitingly satyrical in tone. If you're a Somerset Maugham fan, dip your literary toe into this.

[Sandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is the eve of the Suez crisis in the Fifties. Written in the Sixties with the benefit of hindsight of this political crisis, ‘The Rich Pay Late’ by Simon Raven has a modern tone applicable for our Brexit times. Greed, disloyalty, snobbishness are common. First of the ten novels in Raven’s ‘Alms for Oblivion’ series, in which a Dickensian cast of characters overlap with each other’s lives, each book is a self-contained story from the end of the Second World War to 1973.
‘The Rich Pay Late’ opens as Donald Salinger and Jude Holbrook, co-owners of an advertising agency, discuss the purchase of a financial magazine, Strix. Jude is ambitious but without money, Donald has the cash but is cautious. And so starts the combined theme of gambling/business/love in which everyone is for himself and taking calculated risks is a way of life. Structurally, it is an ensemble story rather than concentrating on one central character; Raven introduces characters with short glimpses, some of one paragraph, of people who start off separate from Donald and Jude until their entwined lives are revealed. Not one character is superfluous.
This is a short novel of 250 pages, but intense. Slow, rich, satirical, it portrays a depressing and bleak take on human nature. The blurred story builds and builds as the appalling characters become real; at times a little dry, I persevered and am pleased I did as the pace of the final third was quicker.
The narrative centres around the sale of Strix and subsequently on a political scandal about Strix’s new board member, Peter Morrison MP. When the magazine’s owner receives the offer to buy his company, Morrison’s vote takes on additional importance. But is he a benefit or a liability?
A tale of politics, media, love affairs and betrayal between a network of upper and upper-middle class men and women with names like Vanessa, Somerset and Jude. In places, the dark humour reminds me of Nancy Mitford’s later novels.
There is some discussion amongst reviewers about the correct order in which to read the series, I’m sticking with Raven’s order. Written fourth, he placed this first in his series.
Read more of my book reviews at http://www.sandradanby.com/book-revie...

[Robert Ronsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another commentary on the scurrilous behaviour of the privileged upper- and middle-classes. This time covering the mid-1950s. This is well up with the standard of the first three. Raven's racy prose never flags as he plumbs the depths of depravity inhabited by his protagonists.
One of the most unsavoury of them is Somerset Lloyd-James who, according to informed sources, was based on a real denizen of London's haunts of influence, William Rees-Mogg. This Rees-Mogg was a contemporary of Raven's at Charterhouse School and is the father of Jacob Rees-Mogg. The son, who until the General Election of 2024, was the Member of Parliament for North East Somerset. He had served as a minister in Boris Johnson's government.
Which brings me to the pervading thought that accompanied my reading of this book. Raven's characters were interested only in their personal self-advancement or self-enrichment, preferably both. On this level, the book works very well as a primer on the premise that the nearer one gets to power so grows the temptation to don the twin cloaks of duplicity and cupidity.
In this it prefigured the real-life behaviour of Raven's characters' equivalents 70 years later. After 2019, for many members of the Tory party, their families, funders and friends, no event, good or ill, was allowed to pass without using it to either climb higher up the greasy pole or bung a few grubby tens to millions of pounds into their yawning pockets.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

[Gav]

This is an example of judging a book by a cover and trusting Vintage Classics. I’m glad I did as between the comic-book art covers of Alm For Oblivion Volume 1 are four short interconnected novels.

It opens with The Rich Pay Late: Jude Holdbrook has a proposal for his business partner, Donald Salinger, for their advert distributor business to buy a magazine called ‘Strix’ so they can grow their empire. We follow how Jude persuades Donald and how successful they are at this endeavour.

It delves into the lives of the rich and privileged. Simon Raven is quick witted, great with dialogue and able to turn scenes on a pin. It’s like reading a scandal unfolding. I got invested in the characters and their dramas and their various connections. Raven gives all of them a nice story arc and the ending is satisfying and ties things off nicely with people getting what they, more or less, deserve.

All this was unexpected as I usually need a murder or man with a sword or a nice spaceship to keep me interested. This had purely Raven to keep me going.

I liked it a lot.

[Hannah Dee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up "Alms For Oblivion" on the Kindle because I'd stumbled across an obituary of the author, and thought he sounded like quite the character.

The Rich Pay Late is a bit of a romp, full of upper class twits being horrible to each other in the 1950s. Fair bit of sex, fair bit of violence, not that many people who are anything other than unpleasant (it took me a while to find a character worth rooting for). I was beginning to think that it'd be an abandoned novel for me, when suddenly it picked up pace and then a few dozen chapters later it finished. Turns out that book one of Alms for Oblivion ("The Rich Pay Late") is about 1/4 of the kindle download, and the percentage of book left to read represented the other three books that had been bundled with this one. Rarely have I been so pleased to arrive at the end of a book - as a short romp, it's fine, if it had gone on as an epic, I think I'd have given up before the end.

I might pick up book two one day.

[Davidg · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first of the Alms for Oblivion sequence.
I was surprised how much I enjoyed this, having hated the Dance to the Music of Time sequence, and the two series are often compared. The main reason is that Raven, like Powell, a member of the upper class, is very aware of its failings. There isn't the dreadful snobbery of the Powell books and the assumption that the rich and privileged are better. Raven mocks the venality and greed of his characters (based on friends and acquaintances).
Nicely nasty.

[Will Staunton · Rating 4 out of 5]

The used bookstore guy recommended this, as Evelyn Waugh-meets-Anthony Powell, the old "moneyed white dudes having literary problems but generally being well off" type affair. It was funny and even reasonably warm-hearted, which was a pleasant surprise. In fact, it encouraged me to take another few paces through Anthony Powell's Dance To The Music Of Time, which my dad (and his buddy, and my buddy) say is perhaps the best series of books ever to be written, but I get awfully bogged down every time I wade in.

[David Galvani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Life amongst lascivious publishing folk. Raven seems not to like his characters or much else. Was the plot about the pregnancy a caricature of Hardy? Not a great read and I’m not bothering with the other nine.

[Pearce · Rating 4 out of 5]

The plot of this was unpromising. Basically, “a ghastly oik who runs an advertising firm wants to buy a controlling interest in a business magazine.” So the result is an object lesson in how it’s not what you’re about, it’s how you go about it. Looking forward to the next nine.

[James Wilson FRHistS · Rating 3 out of 5]

Raven was a good writer - holds the attention and marshals his large cast of mostly very unlikeable sorts well. I’ve deducted a bit because I found the last couple of chapters- wrapping up the story - not anywhere near as believable as the earlier ones.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Started to read these after a friend suggested it.