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 sometimes no more than entertaining. Only a few of them exhibit all of Raven's appreciable gifts as a novelist working together in harmony. These flaws should not, however, be allowed to obscure the fact that Raven is a serious and interesting novelist, whose works have yet to receive, at least in North America, the attention they deserve. (...

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 Alms for Oblivion sequence, in the first volume of which the coarsegrained Jude Holbrook … is cruelly punished for his shystering by the death of his beloved young son. Since then all the protagonists, as well as a few more secondary players like Holbrook, have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. And while most of them have ri...

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 the extinction of the English gentleman. 'Such gentlemen as survive, though honourable and decent men, can only be seen as futile anachronisms when once one properly appreciates the present conditions of society,' Mr Raven wrote 15 years ago. His view has hardened since then, and his gentlemen are no longer honourable and decent&...

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 from the Army, is taken on … by an international organisation bent on combating 'democratic excess and Communist exploitation.'… After a staggering indoctrination course, some tests and assorted sex, he ends up in Venice, confronting his assigned victims at a masked ball. With Jacinth's character, with his easy...

[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 world. As you lay down his book, you will bow in admiration to the clarity of his characterisation, the simplicity of his prose and the design of his plot. I greatly fear that he is a writer with a future, and I only hope I can discourage him. His story is of a homosexual love affair (here we go again) between a god-like subaltern and an earth-chil...

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 change scenes and characters without overt discomfort; his prose is always amusing, elegant, intelligent and never below the belt. Where else except in a Raven novel [Bring Forth the Body] could you find an old whore called Maisie who calls everyone "duckie" and paints her clients, as it were, in oils? Or a maid known as Dolly who i...

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, there's maybe too much ease: Captain Detterling and Leonard Perceval conduct a quiet investigation into the causes of Somerset Lloyd-Jones's suicide, and the book is simply a series of false leads which finally wind around to revelation. The tone, in this roundup of characters from earlier novels, progressively darkens; and Raven i...