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Salient. Victoria University of Wellington Student's Newspaper. Volume 31, Number 9. May 21 1968

Traditional attitudes

Traditional attitudes

Raven's major character takes his position of a member of the intellectual upper class and conducts his behaviour according to these standards. He recognises his inability to communicate with anyone of a lower social status but accepts such a position as his traditional role. The brief callous affair with a local shopgirl, his acknowledged embarrassment of his new-rich parents, his use of the old boy network all reinforce his upper class attitudes. Even after he has lost all his plans of an academic career and his mother has squandered the family wealth he still remains, an officer in the British army, a Tory, a gentleman—an English gentleman with a double set of standards; Raven's own admitted role.

The author's novels are a mixture of the new morality, for example Close of Play which went before the Indecent Publications Tribunal, and the conventional upper class standards, as seen in his essays The English Gentleman. This, his latest novel, is an excellently written book. Raven may write to a pattern which he recognises to be a good seller and undoubtedly based on his own experience but this in no way lessens the high professional quality of his work.

Fielding Gray. A novel by Simon Raven. Published by Anthony Blond, London 1967. N.Z. Price $2.80 Distributed Whitcombe & Tombs. Revised by Jan Walker.