The Old Devils
The Old Devils
Author: Kingsley Amis
Desc: Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering complaining reminiscing and above all drinking. This more or less orderly social world is thrown off-kilter however when two old friends unexpectedly return from England: Alun Weaver now a celebrated man of Welsh letters and his entrancing wife Rhiannon. Long-dormant rivalries and romances are rudely awakened as life at the Bible and Crown the local pub is changed irrevocably. Considered by Martin Amis to be Kingsley Amis’s greatest achievement—a book that “stands comparison with any English novel of the [twentieth] century”—The Old Devils confronts the attrition of ageing with rare candor sympathy and moral intelligence.