Kingsley Amis: Devils and Others

Abstract

The success of The Old Devils was just: it’s a considerable novel, and if anything improves with re-reading. But there’s a certain disjunction between the book and what might be called its notional character. Critics seem agreed that the book is not only set in Wales but is actually about Wales and Welshness. Certainly Amis writes here with his usual brilliancies of comic realism, and gives a whole ‘social geography’ of location and behaviour. But as to the people in his book, some reservations have been expressed. One or two reviewers complained that Amis’s characters have begun, in this late novel, to blur together, to talk and think too much like each other.The problem struck me in a slightly different way. If this is a story of Wales, then it has to be said that the people in it aren’t Welsh — that under all the carefully assembled Welsh locutions the (carefully-assembled) psyches of the characters remain obstinately English, or at least obstinately Amisian. Celts just don’t come like this.