The Anti-Death League

by Kingsley Amis

Brian Leonard, a Monty Python of secret agents, meets James Churchill, a young officer at an English army base where preparations are under way for Operation Apollo. To complicate matters, Churchill has gone round-the-bend for a parole from the mental ward.

Thrown amongst these loose cannons is a widowed beauty who practices "conspicuous polyandry," an unfocused psychiatrist, an unbelieving chaplain, and a charming alcoholic.

"Amis delights in combining espionage, violence, love and religious skepticism. Such disparate elements, like dishpans and fire rings, challenge his juggler's dexterity. Who wins? The reader!" (Publisher's Source)

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Novels, Humor, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, War

307 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Best known novels of British writer Sir Kingsley William Amis include Lucky Jim (1954) and The Old Devils (1986).

This English poet, critic, and teacher composed more than twenty-three collections, short stories, radio and television scripts, and books of social and literary criticism. He fathered Martin Amis.

William Robert Amis, a clerk of a mustard manufacturer, fathered him. He began his education at the city of London school, and went up to college of Saint John, Oxford, in April 1941 to read English; he met Philip Larkin and formed the most important friendship of his life. After only a year, the Army called him for service in July 1942. After serving as a lieutenant in the royal corps of signals in the Second World War, Amis returned to Oxford in October 1945 to complete his degree. He worked hard and got a first in English in 1947, and then decided to devote much of his time.

Pen names: [authorRobert Markham|553548] and William Bill Tanner

Reviews

[Harry Kane · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are broadly speaking two types of Kingsley Amis fans:
1. Those to whom Lucky Jim is the standard by which all other Amis Senior books are measured
2. Those to whom Kingsley Amis starts slowly turning into a real writer somewhere between One Fat Englishman and The Anti-Death League

I belong to the second type. To me, Mr. Amis reaches his peak level with Girl, 20, and onward, but the seeds of his looming greatness are here, in The Anti-Death League. The very first time I read this book I was quite impressed by the man's ability to not compromise with his scandalously misanthropic style, and yet begin adding layers of depth of the type one is more used to find in the likes of Turgenev and Chekov.

People who don't like Kingsley's books tend to fall into some general categories:
a) Waaah, the characters are unlikable, me wants a Han Solo who starts out bad but becomes An Hero!
b) Giggle, the book is do dated, giggle. While I live in the one time in history, which is non-ridicilous and will forever remain a standard of what cool and normal is.
c) Oh no, people have sex! This is so 1960's! Today people don't behave like that at all!
d) Oh no, people have sex! This is so boring today! Everyone does that now!
e) The characters have racist and mysoginist views! I must tell everyone I hate this, in order to maintain my progressivity cred rating!
f) Someone told me this is a Spy Story/Detective Story/Ghost Story, but it's so boring, just people talking! Janet Evanovich and James Patterson are way better at this!

...but there are also reasons to dislike his novels on a book-by-book basis (and dislike the man too, because the difference between book and author is far too abstract for many a mouth-breather), and in this particular book the reason will be 'oh look, haha, Amis doesn't understand how religion works!'

Oh well. If trying to make points off famous people in order to feel special and relevant is your thing, go for it. Perhaps you too will end up a character in a Kingsley Amis book:)

[Lilian · Rating 4 out of 5]

What can I say? The Anti-Death League is of that genre of book that I really enjoy: post-war confusion, espionage, a more than well-furnished cast of character and a healthy dose of humour tinted by world-weariness.

That being said, it's also of that genre of book that is difficult to review and to classify. The action scenes were as typically absurd as all action scenes in this genre, but they also felt purposely rushed, as though Amis wanted to further heighten his reader's confusion. Despite the feeling of intent, the pace sometimes threw me off a bit.

In addition to that, towards the end I felt that the narrative voice shifted, letting through phrases more suited to spoken language.

I felt the religious critique was, at times, a little too heavy handed, but given the subject of the book I can understand why it was such an overbearing theme.

All this aside, it was an amazing and compelling read. I had to force myself to put it down for a week so I could focus on getting work done and actually living. The characters are interesting and well crafted, with Max Hunter and Ayscue being my favourites. The sheer absurdity of everything was a joy, and there wee often times when I found myself laughing out loud (and more often, times when I found myself thinking 'I wish I wrote that!')

A review of this book talked about 'Lightness of touch' and I definitely agree. Apart from the occasional outbursts about religion (thankfully, all of them coming from the characters, with the narration being completely neutral, leaving the reader space to swallow each point made,) the book is legerity in itself. Nothing is taken seriously, not love, not life and not death. Amis manages to take the most complicated of emotions and feelings and distill them into single actions or lines of dialogue that hit right where it counts. All in all, I found it an enjoyable read, and have already recommended it to a few of my friends.

[Feliks · Rating 2 out of 5]

I stated out liking this book well enough. I believe it's my first introduction to the renowned Kingsley Amis; (not to be confused with his son Martin, also a novelist). Anyway Amis per possesses most of what I hoped and expected to find in his prose style: technically rich, proficient, deft. Velly velly English (which I relish, of course). It is that reliable, polished, poised English which I've been away from lately, and have much missed. The Brits are masters of the novel. This one is light, zippy, and brisk; highly-detailed observations of setting and social classes and professional environments. Very reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh in ways; but more even-tempered, less slapstick and more psychology; more individual texture and idiom for the characters.

And Amis deals more openly with sexuality than Waugh (probably benefiting from the later timeperiod in which he wrote). I make this last chivvying/ungenerous remark because I feel at the same time that he writes these sexually-frank yarns; Amis himself doesn't really deal with sex well; even though it is laden throughout the plot and characters. His other books have the same 'frisky' reputation as this one; but I'm not sure whether I'm inclined to pursue them, if they are all as odd as this read. For instance--once when he described an actual coupling, he is as brief as this: 'it was successful'. Really? Gee. Thanks. [Perhaps the one book of his where this might work well, is his James Bond fan-fic. I don't know.]

Moving right along. The novel opens with a very nifty, pleasing, round-the-mulberry-tree way of introducing the characters. This is slick. I had to admit admiration for the way he pulled this off. It's a fun way to generate interest, for sure. Adroit. I wish more authors would follow suit. But by page 50 you see how all the players are coming together; (and you breathe a sigh of relief) and there's also a fun espionage theme developing (the main reason I chose this book to read). The story is set on a Brit army base; and there's a mole to be tracked down. All well and good; (or so I thought). 'This Amis guy is okay after all, I can settle back, relax, and enjoy a cracking good read'. Or so I thought.

But that is turning out not to be quite the case. Right now I'm worried. Because also around that same 'first fifty page mark'--as I've become comfortable with Amis' style, I've begun to identify some annoying infirmities and weaknesses. Now, I'm sure the espionage story-line will be handled very winningly by the close of the tale; (he could hardly botch that element, I hope?) but right now I am not very satisfied with Amis overall.

First, the humor. Yes--it's very nimble--sprightly--winsome. Amis has a dab hand with character-dialog--but there's also something flat and thin about his humor. Just around the edges, it's a little pained and over-packaged. Seems 'straining' to fit itself to an established form. There are some stock characters uttering stock idiosyncrasies. Not sure how better to describe it. It's as if Amis is so studiously aping the authors like Waugh and Wodehouse who came before him--and rose to such fame--that he is self-consciously imitating them to the point of slavishness.

Next: I don't know who to blame for this additional grievance--Amis or myself--but around page 60-65 a character is suddenly mentioned to be dying in hospital. Who is it? Even though I'd been reading closely, I had no idea who this character was, why he was dying, or anything else about him. It's as if he suddenly materialized out of nowhere. Totally upsetting my concentration. Who was dying? Who? I actually flipped back a few pages to see if I could spot whether he'd ever been mentioned before. Really, I flipped back a few pages to see if the spine of the book was missing any pages! Now it could be me, maybe I just missed it. But if it's Amis--not explicating his backstory well enough-- then, I am a little irked. The author has to keep the characters straight for the reader, please.

Next: his characters are complex and engaging, they are quite likeable and interesting..with numerous foibles and quirks. And the story gradually focuses on the two most engaging: a 24 yr old womanizing Captain and an older man, (some kind of Major?) who is the story's true protagonist. Fine, wonderful. As a reader, I agree with Amis' choice of these two main characters to dwell on. This Major is the spy-catcher in the tale; the intel officer on the track of the mole and he's confidence-inspiring and reliable. But then Amis does something unthinkable for this kind of story. Suddenly this protagonist reveals ...via conversation...that he's a closeted homosexual and (did I read this right?) has a taste for boys and young men.

What. The. Heck. (?) First, I certainly don't appreciate being 'sideswiped' like this. Not this far along into the story. Much too jarring. Second, it's just too much to burden the saga with. The narrative itself is now in jeopardy because you have to question everything the protagonist says or does. Right up to this point, Major Leonard was serving in the role that (practically) every novel requires: one trustworthy, normative character anchoring all the others. Now he's openly letting slip all sorts of confidences and asides about how he likes pretty boys in uniform. It's incongruous in all sorts of ways; and totally clashes with the cheerful 'heterosexual voice' of the novel established in all the preceding pages. Overall it simply reinforces my earlier suspicion that Amis is perhaps an author 'trying too hard to be audacious'.

And last (but not least) just a technical issue: NATO intel officers in the sixties were not placed in positions of responsibility if they were 'bent'; because closeted homosexuality was used as leverage by opposition services to double them. They weren't allowed to head counterintelligence operations such as this novel is narrating.

So...I don't know what to say about Amis or this book right now. Is it worth finishing? Very debatable. Dubious prospects ahead, to say the least. This is not the "Monty Python humor" I was promised on the book cover. I wanted a slightly comedic take on the world of Ian Fleming and now I feel like I'm reading Simon Gray.

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

You know how much I love Kingsley's writing, but every book includes something inexcusably silly. In this case, it's the long speech near the end of the novel delivered by the cancer patient Catharine to her near-comatose lover Churchill. While functioning as the mouthpiece of Kingsley's hostility, Catharine goes on for two uninterrupted pages about how Churchill must not confuse the distressing fact of God's absence (about which the lovers are agreed) with the decision to give up on life entirely. Instead, she reasons, he ought to come out of his traumatized stupor and join her in enshrining their love.

What's funny about this (read the speech yourself) is that she winds up bastardizing several famous parts of the Bible to support her position while awkwardly holding the Bible's authority at arm's length. This was already becoming a popular strategy for those of Kingsley's atheistical persuasion by 1966 when this book came out, and is presently flourishing among agnostics everywhere, though far less explicitly in general. We must at least give Kingsley credit for recognizing the strength of the Biblical idea that "perfect love casts out all fear." Indeed it does. But for Catharine and Churchill, that perfect love can never be located in a loving creator God. Instead, as Catharine tells us, it will only be found in some kind of sublunary bliss in one another's arms. Churchill promptly leaves his coma, a kind of secular rebirth.

The novel is actually replete with redemptive imagery (as are most of his works) but Kingsley has done his usual meticulous job of deliberately excluding any shred of possibility of God himself. Indeed the book's representative of God's man, the chaplain Willie Ayscue, gets in several nasty punches at Jehovah that are prototypical of Kingsley's unmatched brand of divine skepticism. Most of these show up at the very end of the story as Kingsley moves to consolidate the bleak implications of Operation Apollo and its Anti-Death League. The ending is, as Kingsley himself might have said, rather hurried, but even if the book's theology is mismanaged (several hasty speeches mangle the last chapter) the growth of thought and the characters is masterfully accomplished. I find that, perhaps to his own chagrin, the shape of Kingsley's fiction consistently hangs on two of the most prominent ideas of Kingsley's life: the heroes are always brilliantly funny and emotionally rich, and they are always weaving between states of anger or apathy toward the God who is not there.

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis

10 out of 10





Having had an accident this morning, in fact just about two hours ago, thinking of the Anti –Death league appears to have another significance – it becomes more important, albeit it was not something quite life threatening, with yours truly cycling there isn’t much if anything to protect one from the cars…this one was an Uber no less, and he was not looking as he turned the corner to the right…well, he was actually mindful of what might come from the left and thus ignored the damn cyclist that he run over…I let it go, because he was regretful in the second phase, after an initial aggressiveness towards bikes and the fools using them in general, on their roads, for this is how drivers see this…



This book has a lot to offer, even if this does not appear to be one of the Great Master’s best, for a list of the magnum opera that the under signed has read, admired immensely you could look at the end of this note, I will only mention the ravishing, hilarious, spectacular Lucky Jim http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/05/l... rated as one of the best comedies and one of the All-TIME 100 novels https://entertainment.time.com/2005/1... where it interestingly sits together with Money, by the son of the brilliant Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis.

The narrative takes place in and mostly around a British Army camp, which is preparing for a formidable operation, called Apollo – from the well-known Ancient Greece god, who was the patron of beauty and magnificence, but unbeknownst to yours truly, he was also the divine figure spreading the plagues and diseases – that will involve army personnel travelling to China, abducting dispatchers and others there, taking them to a one person tent, inoculating them with a plague that has been tested and elaborated in such a manner as to provoke psychological as well as physical, literal devastation, in that it is deadly, easily catching and the symptoms are horrible to experience and to be seen by others, with barking like manifestations during breathing, which becomes almost impossible.



One would naturally think of the Coronavirus and the disaster it has brought to the world and furthermore, the idiotic conspiracies that surround the origin and the spread of this calamity…early on, in February, we were sitting and sweating in the hammam – ou sont les neiges d’antan, these have been closed since march and there is no opening in sight, perhaps for the next year or so, until a vaccine is available even here – and we were talking about the virus and then one of the multitude that embrace conspiracy theories, elaborated on the notion that this is surely a weapon, some nefarious groups have launched it and that I am naïve to reject this and actually all these theories together as stupid and vicious.

The book is not silly in that it purports the plan of an army to use weapons of this kind against the enemy, indeed, China is the target in the novel and we will soon see what they have in store for the rest of the world, after they have taken Tibet and imposed their tyranny there, caged the Uighurs and placed them in huge camps, build up artificial islands in waters that belong to others, bullied the world, even if this virus is their fault, in that it appeared in a wet market and they had known how dangerous these places are and then they had kept mum, lied about it for long enough to have this plague conquer the world…



Lieutenant James Churchill is as close to the hero of the book as one can get and he is supposed to participate in operation Apollo, as he meets Catharine Casement, the patient of a lunatic asylum, after she had been abused, beaten and traumatized by her husband, falling into the hands of another weird, mad man, doctor Best, the one who has one explanation for all the mental, psychiatric problems that men and women may or may not have, repressed homosexuality is what explains the world of pain and spiritual suffering for this doctor-that should be a patient – I think I have read somewhere that psychiatrists tend to have issues and then they have to take up an analyst themselves periodically, because dealing with trauma on a regular basis affects one’s psyche, spirit and mind.

James Churchill and Catharine Casement fall in love and their beautiful romance is one of the main elements, perhaps the keystone of the story, only the problem is that she has a nodule that turns out to be cancer and the explanation given by the man involves another theme of the book, which also deals with religion, both the Christian and the Hindu faiths, for Churchill is very mad with God, if he exists he has brought about a lot of suffering, decapitation, the cancer that could kill the love of his life and then that whole apocalyptic mission he is supposed to participate in and wants no part of, once he finds what the diagnosis is, he just lies on the bed and does not care for anything anymore, and Captain Moti Naidu is one of those who try to wake him up and make him live again, mentioning the arrogance, the lack of modesty and individualism, self-obsession that are specific to us in the West, and they are in contrast with the Eastern cultures and faiths, which put emphasis on the collective and not the individual, as we do in the West.



As the Army unit prepares for the secret and dystopian operation Apollo, there are quite a few events taking place in and around the camp, from the manifests of the Anti-Death League, a movement that is self-explanatory in its title, to the poem against religion and god that is sent to the army chaplain, William Ayscue, and finally, to the sabotage and presence of enemy agent or agents, signaled by the suspicions of Captain Brian Leonard, the security officer, who is certain from one point on that Doctor Best is the spy he is looking for and his theory is given more than weight, an appearance of firmness once the atomic shotgun is missing and furthermore, it is used…this would be an invention that will probably not come to life, given its danger for the soldiers and the civilian population, although there is such a thing as the tactical nuclear weapons, smaller if also very deadly bombs that can be used to destroy enemy forces, but without the impact of the well-known H and other weapons that transform large areas into dust.

The Anti-Death League is surely the work of a phenomenal creator, but this reader admires more these other novels, exhilarating magnum opera:



Girl, 20 http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/07/g...

The Old Devils http://realini.blogspot.com/2019/05/t...

Stanley and the Women http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/02/s...

Ending Up http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/07/e...

[James Henderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

With The Anti-Death League Amis begins to show some of the experimentation – with content, if not with style – which would be a hallmark of his work for more than a decade. Amis’s departure from the strict realism of his early comedic novels is not so abrupt as might first appear. He had avidly read science fiction since a boy, and had developed that interest into the Christian Gauss Lectures of 1958, while visiting Princeton University. The lectures were published in that year as New Maps of Hell: a Survey of Science Fiction, a serious but light-handed treatment of what the genre had to say about man and society. Amis was particularly enthusiastic about the dystopian works of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, and in New Maps of Hell coined the term "comic inferno" to describe a type of humorous dystopia, particularly as exemplified in the works of Robert Sheckley. Amis further displayed his devotion to the genre in editing, with the Sovietologist Robert Conquest, the science fiction anthology series Spectrum I–V, which drew heavily upon 1950s numbers of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction.
Though not explicitly science fiction, The Anti-Death League takes liberties with reality not found in Amis’s earlier novels, and introduces a speculative bent into his fiction. This is one of the aspects that drew me to this work. I was also impressed that The Anti-Death League made it to Anthony Burgess's list of his favorite 99 novels. Several of my favorite, sometimes less-well-known novels, are on his list which I find a valuable resource. Ultimately this Amis novel was not as satisfying as I expected it would be, but a good light read instead.

[Perry Whitford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amorous, alcoholic soldiers at a training barracks in England prepare for a top secret mission by downing endless drinks and taking turns with a local nymphomaniac, but the Security Officer is certain that there is a spy in their midst.

Brian Leonard has the job of cornering the spy, but he's not very subtle about it, despite being "practiced in phylactological thought", obscure military jargon which a colleague, Ross-Donaldson, enjoys quoting fluently.

Meanwhile, a young soldier set to take part in Operation Apollo named Churchill falls in love with a damaged woman just released from a local mental hospital, where an insane doctor is convinced that all his patients are repressed homosexuals.

The characters are all terribly mature and businesslike about sex, but hopelessly juvenile and unprofessional about espionage, which is no recipe for being taken seriously. Yet Amis's themes were all the big ones - love and hate, life and death - even as the cardboard nature of the characters robs them of all depth.

It's often the case in satire however, and that considered, the entire comic performance holds up reasonably well throughout, but for one or two particularly heavy handed jabs at God, the only character in the book that Amis doesn't like very much.

Perhaps most importantly though, it's an entertaining read throughout, an object which Amis senior always had in mind when he wrote a novel, unlike Amis junior.

Glib? Yes. Shallow? Sure. Dated? A little. Boring? Not for one minute.

[Zoeb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel myself at a loss for words. What did I just finish reading? Was it a comedy? It was certainly very amusing, just as we expect the same from Amis, in places, though there is nothing here to rival the crystallised, cynical brilliance of that legendary paragraph on a hangover from "Lucky Jim" but then again, not all of it was fun and games. Was it a serious moral parable, then, about who or what is responsible for death and war and unhappiness, is it us or is it the omnipotent God up there in the heavens? Surely, there was some of this in "The Anti-Death League" but surely, it was not wholly serious, or I would not be chuckling throughout at its very silliness. So, is it a hilarious send-up of the British military establishment and a satire about the starchy, khaki-clad bigwigs as well as about the boffins inventing diabolical weapons that will never be actually used in any war? Yes, perhaps, it is that but then what are comedy and religious query doing in a satire like this?

Enough questions, I think. "The Anti-Death League" is, for better or for worse, a novel that tries to be all of these things and while it is superbly written and succeeds admirably in trotting across these genres with its absurd but assured blend of Amis' signature deadpan humour and an unexpected element of emotional resonance, it is eventually a book that bites off more than it can chew and its overarching ambition, while never overstated, eventually stops it from being perfect. A few intriguing plot developments are rushed through, a few unimportant developments are given more leg room than necessary and the book cannot quite do justice to each of its characters, despite setting them up interestingly enough. As I said, far from perfect. But is perfection really what Amis was vying for in the first place?

I would not really want to reveal much about the plot or even the bare bones of the narrative, which is, as it would be in a book that tries to do many things at the same time, extremely loose and at times even ludicrous and yet at the same time, not as loose or sprawling as we would expect it to be. It would suffice to say that this book is about an almost anonymous military unit posted somewhere in England, housing a secret weapon that only a few know about and possibly "preparing" for some secret mission that even fewer know about as well. We are introduced to a handful of the officers of the unit - among whom even fewer actually matter - young and already jaded Lieutenant James Churchill, the alcoholic Captain Max Hunter, the camp parson William Ayscue and, of course, Captain Brian Leonard, a spy from Whitehall in their midst - the novel follows these men and chronicles their feelings of paranoia, unease, disillusionment and despair over the course of these three hundred pages. Meanwhile, strange, comic, tragic, unsettling and even downright catastrophic things keep on happening; casual sex, spirits and psychology flow freer than blood and water and somewhere, in the middle of the novel, somebody in the camp thinks of founding the titular "league" to declare war on God himself.

It is all unabashedly ridiculous, absurdly logical, surprisingly tender, movingly romantic and even eerily suspenseful and as I look back at it now, I find it difficult to sum it up and try and make some sense of it all. It is like Amis blended in a heady serving of Monty Python - though this was written before Monty Python even went live - and Spike Milligan's outrageous wartime memoirs and topped it off with a dash of Kipling's sardonic verses and stories about the mundane boredom of the barracks and, of course, his own silken irreverence, and served out a drink that is both intoxicating and infuriating in equal measure. And yet, even as much of "The Anti-Death League" might seem too baffling to a reader trying to find some pattern of coherence or plausibility, one would do better to suspend one's disbelief and surrender gladly to the heady, even hedonistic charm of the novel because Amis, being a true storyteller at heart, serves it with both style and subtlety so that it is all marvelously easy to drink in even with its inherent inanity.

Subtlety...that is the thing that does it. This could have been easily a in-your-face, wild, uproariously comic novel in the post-modern style of similarly experimental novels that came out in the some time - you could almost imagine some American author like Pynchon or the like, padding out this kind of zany material with even more affected zaniness but ah, therein lies the wonderful difference, which really lifts "The Anti-Death League" from its abstractness to something much more meaningful and resonant that what it should be. Amis might have a wild, even wickedly perverse imagination, but he was, at heart, a gentle, unassuming traditionalist in his prose and storytelling and it is this calm, cool reserve with which he lets the plot unravel in its inspired lunacy and unexpected dramatic intensity which makes this novel so compulsively readable from cover to cover. The language is simple but pointed and functional and enlivened at the right places by Amis' wit but more crucially than that, here is a novel with a story, no matter how loose or ludicrous, running through it with a fair level of coherence and here's a story with characters whom we believe and care for that makes us feel for them as well. There is a sweet but also utterly poignant love story as a sub-plot in this book; there is sex but it never feels gratuitous or obscene; there is drinking but it only fosters an endearing fellow-feeling between these soldiers and potential spies and there is something warm and affectionate about this camaraderie among these men. And there is also some wisdom, no matter how irrational, to be found as well. It is almost as if Amis, as a final winning touch to his cocktail that he crafts so devilishly, had also poured in a generous helping of Graham Greene into his drink and the result is both darkly comic and unexpectedly upbeat, both wicked and warm, both clever and compassionate at the same time.

Most crucially, though, even as many blame Amis for being a storyteller of his times, I was most pleasantly surprised by even how some of the crazier elements of the narrative make quite some sense when you think hard about them. In full adherence to the Official Secrets Act, I would not like to reveal the secret of the project or the intentions behind the same but I think I can let out that as the reader stumbles upon them in the last twenty pages, one is as struck by their odd plausibility as tickled by its absurdity. This is a book about how the wind of false news and rumours, if fanned with cunning, can be as devastating as a well-aimed missile and how the fear of a plague, even a manufactured one, can possibly create chaos and tilt the scales of world power. A comic novel has no right to talk about these serious things but Amis' novel admirably, if a little childishly, does. Didn't I say that there is a shade of Greene in all this?

"The Anti-Death League" is then an almost brilliant satire. I say "almost-brilliant" for there are a few false notes which is why this missed earning a full five stars from me. I admired how Amis had something meaningful and even wise to say at the end of the sprawling narrative but there are a few times when some of this overt moralising stuck out like a sore thumb. This is less of a problem in itself and more of a sign of the writer's rare occasion for self-indulgence. It should be remembered that Amis was, at this time, keen on experimenting with genres, as evidenced by the James Bond novel "Colonel Sun", thus signifying a departure from his "angry-man, anti-establishment" novels, which began with the immortal "Lucky Jim". Which is why, along with all these welcome elements of worldly advice and romance, one finds oneself in the middle of some relentless scramble for cover under gunfire or some hoary, actually hilarious espionage angle which we are also supposed to take seriously for a while. These are parts that don't quite work. The humour, as said before, is classic Amis laced with a surrealism that feels distinctly like a predecessor of the blistering wit and jaunty slapstick of the Flying Circus - Captain Leonard, my favourite character and easily the closest that we have to a hero in the novel, lives up to what the blurb calls him as a "Monty Python" of an agent - and I could not help underlining a few of my favourite lines as I will quote them here. But we expect more from a humourist as skilled and shrewd as Amis and "Lucky Jim" will still be his masterpiece, both wacky and tender and without a single false step as a story.

"...but about the eye visible to Hunter, there was something exultant, ardent, even awe-struck, such as might be seen...in a devout youth off to his first communion, or an elderly sexual deviate approaching the arena where every detail of his hitherto impracticable perversion had finally been marshalled."

"The comb slipped and tore jerkily through Jagger's fiery thatch in a way that suggested this was something he did every couple of years."

But then as I said, perfection was not in Amis' agenda. "The Anti-Death League" deserves its 4 stars handsomely and perhaps it is only right that it misses that one star because it never wanted to be perfect, I think. As a character would have quoted, "sometimes, you've got to be impractical and illogical and a bit useless." This novel is certainly the first two things but most certainly not "useless" at all. Drink it up and discover for yourself.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the whole, I've enjoyed every book by Kingsley Amis that I've read. The Anti-death League was no exception. It wasn't necessarily the best book by Amis that I've read, but it was still a different, enjoyable read. It took a bit to get into and get hold of the story-line but it improved steadily.
The book tells the story of a Army unit created and housed somewhere in England. It's part of a special project, Project Apollo, that is to take action sometime in the near future. The personnel are training for Apollo, but we don't really know what it is. One of the officers, Capt Leonard, isn't really an officer, but assigned to ferret out a spy in their midst. It's not a secret that he is, but that's his job. Into the mix as well, are two women, Catherine and Lucy. Lucy basically has men over to her house every night and spends the night in bed with each visitor, commitment issues it seems. Catherine lives there after a stay at a local asylum and is hiding from an abusive husband and trying to get her life in order. Capt. Churchill, another officer, falls for Catherine.
Throw into the mix, Dr. Best, the head of the asylum, who has treated both Catherine and Churchill and seems to be somewhat off.
So you've got a varied mix of characters and story-lines. Is it a spy story? Is it a romance? And what is the Anti-Death League, you ask? Well, they all make for an increasingly interesting story that does for the most part come to a satisfying conclusion... Well, except for one thing that I don't get really. You'll know that on the last line of the story. Amis has an interesting way of creating and telling stories. Worth giving a try. (3.5 stars)

[Mommalibrarian · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was stuck without a book traveling and bought this at a library sale because I thought I recognized the author's name. Copyright 1966.

There is 'humor' sneaking bottles of liquor into a hospital for an alcoholic inside a cake and the general 'very Britishness' of the British characters. The first being much less funny than it probably seemed when it was written. The sexual revolution is in view: with an actual practicing homosexual and about her marriage Catherine muses, "I suppose I started realizing it after about two years. But it took a long time to dawn on me properly. I was very ignorant in those days. I was only nineteen, but I'd had so much sex already then that I thought I knew all about it." The Cold War is a minor character as Communist spies are imagined.

The book was sudden sections of dead seriousness. These break the mood and make the whole feel like it is two different novels jammed together. This is one of those book where I felt the author did things to the characters just because as the author he was all powerful.

[Peter Dunn · Rating 3 out of 5]

The blurb on the rear of this edition would lead the reader to think that the book is some sort of mad cap farce. It is as if the reviewer had been told second hand about some of the story elements of this book but they had ever actually read anything bar Amis’s “Lucky Jim” and just assumed it was more of the same.

The reality is very different. It isn’t exactly laugh out loud funny, which is hardly surprising as it subjects its characters to: domestic violence, cancer, crises of faith, crises of conscience, professional failure, sudden death, madness, sexual assault, unrequited love, and alcoholism. Even the very last sentence of the very last page throws in one last moment of random horror for one (or more) of the characters.

What is it then? It’s certainly surreal and it’s not entirely without some humour. It might come close to being described as being a bit like a British version of “Catch 22”. What it certainly is an insight into Amis’s own then hardening views on religion and his approaches to alcohol and the women in his life.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this as an oddity in the Kingsley corpus. It's slightly sci-fi and fairly whimsical, and I would say incredibly dated. I kept thinking he must have written it with the idea of its being filmed, and I'm sure it would have made an archetypal 60s movie, with numerous thickly-pencilled wacky characters, a crazy complicated plot and elaborate and silly, yet essentially predictable, denouement. Shades of Strangelove and of Casino Royale.

It's fantasy rather than satire, on the themes of love and death, and it's full of fondness for all its characters; that's probably true of all Amis's novels but here there's hardly anyone who's even annoying - to the omniscient narrator at least - other than in a pantomime fashion.

Honestly not essential for the fairly casual Kingsley reader, but on the other hand a minor gem for lovers of lost(ish) 60s period pieces.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only my third Kingsley Amis but sufficiently different from the other two ("Lucky Jim" and "Take A Girl Like You") that I am now more curious to see what the remainder of his work is like.
While a bit satirical, the story also has many elements of a Raymond Chandler sort, in which a mystery has to be unraveled and a military spy caught and virtually everyone and everything turns out to be something other than what they appeared. He wrote this two years before pseudonymously doing a post-Ian Fleming James Bond story of his own.
The characters also consume alcohol at a rate that mirrors the author's own life but might be a bit exaggerated from what prevailed at a peace-time army camp in 1965 - hard to know for sure.

[erocchio · Rating 4 out of 5]

very bizarre. would not recommend though maybe i missed something. war book of some operation that was not really an operation at all and all the characters are not who they seem to be so there is some mystery. there's love hetero and homo. there's espionage, people who are crazy or appear to be or not. very confusing. i'll try another of his books to see if they're all like this one. he's supposed to be a prolifically good writer.

[Dan Honeywell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many readers have given this a 2 or 3 star rating, however, what is important here is that I enjoyed it. As unserious (is that a word?) as this book is, it is more serious than the other 15 or so books of his that I've read. The trips to Lucy's house are quite comic...

[Tom Quinn · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was recommended to me because I enjoyed Catch-22. Well, Catch-22 it ain't, but there's a similar muddling-through-the-beauracracy vibe, a couple of laughs, and enough clever turns of phrase to keep you reading through this very British anti-war and anti-authority comedy.

[Jc · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like it more, but just couldn't. Plotting spotty, characterization off, just a big pile of meh. Well written though, with Kingsley's customary cutting eye.

[Alfie Grocott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good, just shy of five stars. Very intricately plotted with some memorable characters.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 4 out of 5]

4½. The best work I've read by Kingsley Amis.

[Derek Collett · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read (or at least thought I had read) all of Amis's novels between the middle of the 1980s and the middle of the following decade. Now I found that I missed a few along the way, and this is one of them. I was encouraged to read it when I discovered recently that Anthony Burgess had tagged it as one of his best 'Ninety-Nine Novels' written since 1939.

This is a very curious book and I confess I don't really know what to make of it. Ostensibly it is a science fiction story but, like Nigel Balchin's Kings of Infinite Space, one set apparently only a short time after its publication date in the mid-1960s. It's about a group of army officers preparing to go into battle against the Chinese who have to try and find a traitor in their midst. It's well written, amusing in parts and interesting in others but it never really moved me - I didn't get caught up in it and found myself speed-reading certain dull passages in order to get onto something better. I also don't know what sort of book this is: a comedy? a spy story? a novel about soldiers and soldiering? a sci-fi adventure story? a philosophical tract? It's all of those things at some point.

This was the start of Amis's 'experimental period' and I must admit that I much prefer earlier, more straightforward novels of his such as Lucky Jim, That Uncertain Feeling and Take a Girl Like You. This book contains some very funny moments and some amusing characters (Jagger in particular) but the earlier works have more of both. Amis makes good use of technical information derived from his time spent in the Army signals division during World War Two (some of his short stories also benefit from the same experience) and he also demonstrates copious knowledge of alcoholic drink (another well-known Amis interest!). That's perhaps one of the problems with this book - the author throws all sorts of different things into the pot and expects them to gel but they don't, at least not to my way of thinking.

Burgess says that The Anti-Death League is "a masque of ultimate bitterness" and "a noble cry from the heart on behalf of human suffering". He also remarks that, to his knowledge, only Brighton Rock has "a sourer ending" than this volume. Amen to that.

[Steve · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gosh this was tiresome. Railing against the Calvinists’ god maybe came over as radical once upon a time, but nowadays seems utterly dated. Then again, these days we’re all too familiar with the genre ‘theology by people who choose to know nothing about it’, so in that sense it’s a modern book too.

What makes it such a bore is the author’s utter confidence in the self-evident rightness of his conclusions, that his observations are never explored in any depth. There’s not even any sign that the author or any of the characters (even the vicar!) are aware that there is any depth to explore, or a complex range of positions that people could take. The result is a novel that is not a plunging of the reader into the heart of a problem, but a simple manifesto: a statement of a problem solved.

Don’t get me wrong: the problem isn’t that it fails philosophically (but seriously, the lack of knowledge is staggering: Christianity is more than Calvinism; the problem of evil is the start of a conversation, not a sixth-form QED) but that it fails as a novel. The strength of the novel as an art form is precisely its ability to explore the human implications of our nice clean ideas. There is therefore no better medium for exploring the problem of evil, and so in failing to make that exploration, this novel becomes nothing but a huge wasted opportunity.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm quite a fan of Amis' better known work - Luck Jim Jake's Thing The Old Devils etc so I thought I'd give this a go.While entertaining and once or twice laugh out loud funny it's definitely of it's time and is interesting as an insight into life in the army in the early '60s as much as anything else now.The several intertwined plots include spys atomic secrets and large scale military strategy. Amis' dislike of psychiatry is well to the fore though amusing parallels are drawn between a mental hospital and the barracks. His mysogeny is quite apparent as well the few women in the book seem to exist solely to serve or service the men. The whole is bookended by the rediscovery of some lost 18th century music.There is enough plot to get grab the attention but it's the period detail that is the most fascinating; pretty much every time anyone meets anyone else they break out the booze regardless of the time of day. I know Amis was a bit of an old soak but the amount of alchohol his characters consume is quite startling their choice of tipple also seems to define them.On the whole I quite liked the book though it took a while to get into; it's not one of his finest and is probably for Amis completists only.

[Kristen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Anti-Death League is a pretty dark comedy. The central theme of the book is a tension between not believing in god and being really angry at him. Is it better to believe the cruelty that people suffer is random or designed? Is there anything we can do to deal with it? Does it even matter? Amis's characters throw out a number of potential answers, but in the end (and it's a cruel, teasing ending) none of them really seem to be enough. What keeps all this heavy material afloat is the fact that The Anti-Death League is a well-plotted satire of le Carré-style postwar spy novels. There are a number of mysteries that will keep you guessing, as well as some good jokes and turns of phrase from Amis.

[Mike Harper · Rating 3 out of 5]

The plots are interesting, but not overly clever. The humor is there, of course, but not on a par with Lucky Jim. The characters are interesting, if a little unbelievable.
The dialog is the strong point, making this a worthwhile read. I kept being reminded of Evelyn Waugh's novels, the ones that deal with incompetent upper-class twits in the Army. Britain seems to have an inexhaustible supply of upper class twits, and quite a number of authors who can capture them in an engaging manner.
If I keep on writing, I may decide to promote this novel to four stars, so I'll stop here.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A satirical masterpiece, mixing lurid black humour, with mind numbing boredom and drunken posturing. A feeling of macabre suspense, absurdly suspended below an English veneer, and contradicted at every turn by a world full of earthly sensations, and yet, conspicuously absent of anything particularly spiritual. The almost anonymous, shadowy introduction is a forewarning of the layers of deceit, polite chitchat, military hierarchy and a generally bizarre cold war atmosphere to come. Of course, all of this is topped off by a vaguely philosophical choice. Are you pro or anti-death?

[Freddy Fossey-Warren · Rating 4 out of 5]

A spy thriller where catching the spy is the least important part of the narrative. A book of ideas where every character seems to hate thinking too deeply. A deeply cynical, misanthropic book that seems driven by a love of mankind.

Not the best book I've ever read, but there are so many flashes of brilliance I can't help but love it

[Greg Olsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The spy business was okay, but I didn't find this book extremely captivating. It is a bit antiquated in its content, and I didn't find the characters developed enough to explain their actions towards the end.

[Paulisbored · Rating 2 out of 5]

Witty, as you would expect, but it really hasn't dated well.

[mkfs · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enjoyable enough novel, though not Kingsley Amis at his most entertaining.

Part of the problem seems to stem from the military base setting: Amis appears to be quite out of his depth here, with all the details (except the drinking) coming across as a layman's idea of how military intelligence would operate. He just doesn't pull it off, yet for some reason does not choose to make an absolute farce of the whole thing, as the fourth season of Black Adder does.

One of the aspects of a Kingsley Amis novel that I most enjoy is when the blinkered worldview of the what assumes to be the author is revealed, through interaction between characters, to be that of the main character. A good example of this is the portrayal of a gay couple in Difficulties With Girls, which begins as an embarrassing caricature, but gradually reveals two human beings struggling in a difficult relationship who occasionally ham it up a bit to shock the straights. Unfortunately, there is no such sophistication on display here, even though there is plenty of opportunity for it with so many characters moaning about how unfair death is.

[Andrew Wardle · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Another rather odd venture for Kingsley Amis - a spy novel a la John le Carre about the strange goings-on at a top-secret establishment of the British Army concerned with the development and testing of a new and terrible doomsday weapon.
Like a previous Amis I've read, "The Riverside Villas Murder" (an impossible-murder-case-solved-by-the-maverick-detective novel), he seems to have consciously taken the decision to pastiche and parody the style of a popular genre - this time the convoluted paranoid spy novel. "Riverside Villas" works rather well. But in this one, although the witty badinage and the depiction of extra-curricular activities of a group of bored young soldiers are skilfully done, the attempt falls rather flat. The spy-caper plot convolutions, although clearly meant to be tongue-in-cheek, are so ludicrous that the reader is unable to suspend disbelief enough to care about who the spy unconvincingly turns out to be. Sentimental subplots about love at first sight add little to the story except padding and digging the author out of a few plot holes. An interesting experiment, but not my cuppa.