The Old Devils
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A pub gathering of elderly married couples devolves into mischief in this “sharp and funny” British comedy about marriage, aging, and friendship.
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 aging with rare candor, sympathy, and moral intelligence.
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O autorovi
Kingsley (William) Amis, novelist, poet, and critic, took his MA at Oxford and was a lecturer in English at Swansea and Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. A satirist and debunker of note, he is best known for such social comedies as his first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), but also saw science fiction as an ideal medium for satirical and sociological extrapolation. Amis’ controversial artistic evolution from supposed radical to national institution was neatly summed up by his receipt of a knighthood in 1990.
