A certain formula for success

Simon Raven has found a successful formula for his novels: the effect of sexual degradation on the upper classes. This is the fourth novel in his 'Alms for Oblivion' sequences and his hero Fielding Gray appeared as a minor character the other volumes. Fielding Gray in this novel gives the story of his early life in what is the now familiar Raven pattern. His name of course is an indication of his character—an intelligent boy with a homosexual bent.

Fielding is in his last year at a public school, heir apparent to the head boy and the likelihood of a brilliant university career in Classics before him. Although he is warned against it be proceeds to seduce a younger schoolmate who eventually turns to prostitution and suicide when Fielding deserts him. The relationship is used by a schoolfellow to win the school leadership and by Fielding's mother to force him to abandon a university career.

Parody of the sacred

Raven excells in his treatment of the constantly changing relationships between people and the change in characters themselves. Ravens hero is the seducer, finding his younger schoolmate sexually attractive and vet when the boy succumbs Fielding is disappointed at the loss of the lad's innocence. He says of Christopher; "He smiled, or rather, that's what he thought he did. But his smile had changed: although the mouth and the lips were the same, there was a new look in the eyes, a look of invitation. It was no longer a smile, it was a leer. So that's what's gone, I thought: innocence. And then this look, which would have been so welcome in many others as a herald of casual pleasure, filled me, for a moment, with loathing. In others I should have thought it saucy, sexy, enticing; in Christopher I found it an obscene parody of something which I had once-only a day before-held almost sacred."

Fielding realizes that his homesexual relationships are only a temporary testing ground for his sexual skills. His interest in homosexuality is merely intellectual, for which he finds support in Greek and Latin and in the public school system. He has amused himself with a variety of boys in the past without ill-effects and realizes it is only part of the graduation to women. Yet he reasons that since there are not yet any women towards whom he can graduate, and since his reading of Greek and Latin recommends it, one can have the best of both worlds. He sees homosexuality at the same time as a rejection of Christian morality. To him it is a pleasant pastime and he cannot understand Christopher's desperation and is annoyed at his demands.

Raven uses passages where Fielding can rationalize, explain his non-involvement and so link together the plot. Raven illustrates, and indeed it is this he himself believes, the upper-class arrogance and non-concern. His hero is aloof from the problems of others, taking an intelligent interest but remaining uninvolved until his own immediate interests are threatened.

Perhaps one of the best drawn characters in the book is Fielding's mother. She is shown to be the meek wife of a blustering man, and it is she who defends her son and his right to choose his own career. It is only when her husband dies and she is in control of the purse-strings that it is shown that she has taken over her husband's voice, had been defending Fielding only to bind him tighter to her and has reverted to her bourgoise ideas of wanting her son to be a "real man" doing a "useful job" even if it is not what her son wants. It is the separation between the educated and the uneducated, the intelligent child and the domineering parent, and as Fielding (or Raven) sees it, the conflict of class 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.