Simon Raven was a highly productive writer who made a significant and distinctive contribution to postwar English fiction, especially in the ten novels of his "Alms for Oblivion" sequence, published b...
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Critical Essay by James Kennaway
[If] you can plough through the first 130 pages [of The Feathers of Death], most of which are irrelevant, you will then be drawn into Mr. Raven's horrible worl...
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Critical Essay by John Coleman
Brother Cain is the oddest book I expect to read this year. Jacinth Crewe, after expulsion from school, premature departure from Cambridge, and enforced resignation fro...
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Critical Essay by Kerry Mcsweeney
The very bulk of Raven's writing might suggest what a reading of his novels confirms: they are uneven in quality, occasionally repetitious and forced, and som...
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Critical Essay by Peter Straub
Bring Forth the Body is the penultimate volume in Simon Raven's Alms For Oblivion series, but it stands quite easily on its own as a separate novel. In fact, the...
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Critical Essay by Peter Ackroyd
There are a great many novels concerned with political intrigue, but none of them have Mr Raven's peculiarly steely glint. He is a master craftsman, who can cha...
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Critical Essay by Julian Symons
The Survivors is the tenth and last volume in Simon Raven's 'Alms For Oblivion' sequence, and the death of culture is somehow mixed up in it with ...
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Critical Essay by Michael Barber
For all his worldly pagan sermonising, Simon Raven is as obsessed by sin and retribution as a hell-fire divine. This has been apparent from the very beginning of his ...
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Simon (Arthur Noel) Raven
Critical Essay by James Kennaway
