The Old Devils

Literary fiction · Dark comedy

First published: 1986
Print length: 294 pagesPerennial Library, 1988

Booker Prize, 1986

Description

After years away, Welsh writer Alun Weaver returns home with his wife, Rhiannon, and resumes life among friends who never left. His arrival unsettles the group’s familiar routines: Alun drinks with the men at the local pub while pursuing their partners, reviving old desires and exposing grievances that age has sharpened rather than erased. Around him, marriages strain, affection goes unanswered, and alcohol turns nostalgia into accusation. The friends’ competing ideas of Wales—its history, culture, and value to those who stay or leave—shadow their private resentments. Caustic and comic, the novel follows a circle confronting aging, disappointment, and the stories they tell to preserve their pride.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dialogue-driven · Direct · Witty

Pace

Measured

Tone

Humorous · Irreverent · Melancholic · Satirical

Structure

Linear

Focus

Character · Relationships · Voice

Emotional intensity

3 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

AddictionAgingBelongingIdentityMarriageMemory

About Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher whose long career combined social comedy with a sustained interest in genre fiction. He wrote more than twenty novels as well as poetry, memoir, stories, scripts and criticism. Lucky Jim (1953), one of the earliest British campus novels, made academic pretension and professional insecurity the basis of direct, farcical comedy and helped set a pattern for later campus fiction. Amis kept returning to vanity, compromised relationships and the pressures of institutions, but he did so in markedly different forms. The Green Man joins a flawed innkeeper’s appetites to a supernatural threat, while The Alteration places a threatened child chorister under an authoritarian church in an alternate England. In The Old Devils (1986), he brought that social attention to aging friends whose drinking, marriages and arguments about Wales expose old grievances.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Perennial Library
Language: English
ISBN: 9780060971465

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