The Old Devils (New York Review Books Classics)

The Old Devils (New York Review Books Classics)

Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s <i>The Old Devils</i>, 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. <br><br>Considered by Martin Amis to be Kingsley Amis’s greatest achievement—a book that “stands comparison with any English novel of the [twentieth] century”—<i>The Old Devils</i> confronts the attrition of ageing with rare candor, sympathy, and moral intelligence.