The 1962 Club: Close of Play / Simon Raven

One of my projects for 2024 is to read Simon Raven’s ten-novel sequence Alms for Oblivion. I’m desperate for something that will give me the same hit as Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, added to which it’s probably the height of bad form to have lived in Cambridge all my adult life and never read a word of Raven. I decided his 1962 novel Close of Play might serve as an aperitif to next year’s banquet.

Well, let’s forget about Anthony Powell right now, because on the strength of this novel the comparison does Raven no favours whatsoever. There isn’t a sentence in the book with a scintilla of Powell’s elegance. That’s not to say there aren’t things to enjoy, but you have to take what you can get.

To begin with, I was optimistic. Hugo Warren is at Cambridge and about to sit his finals. At a party held by the Junior Dean he meets Jennifer Stevens, a fresher at Girton. By page 4, they’re engaged in mutual masturbation. There’s quite a bit of sex in this book, which is probably one of the things admirers of Raven’s books appreciate about them. Well, I appreciate sex too, but I’m not convinced Raven knows how to use it. You’ll get a chapter that opens:

‘Hugo?’

‘Yes, Jennifer?’

‘Would you like to try that new thing again?’

‘Yes.’

Which is fun enough the first time, but his treatment of sex rarely goes beyond the level of schoolboy sniggering. (A contemporary review of the novel by Adrian Mitchell places the sexual content at the level of ‘fascinated disgust’.) Some of the sex is germane to the plot, but the plot might have been achieved without it, and the novel would have been a more serious thing as a result. It’s quite possible Raven has no interest in being serious.

Anyway, sex is only one aspect. Hugo, an orphan, is the surrogate son of his distant cousin James Escome, headmaster of Baron’s Lodge, a small prep school on the Kent coast, whose staff Hugo is expected to join when he graduates. Then (MINOR SPOILER ALERT) a ball struck by Hugo in a cricket match takes out Escome’s son Lionel. Another chapter opening:

‘I’ve told you a hundred times,’ said Harold, ‘It wasn’t your fault. Lionel died of a cerebral haemorrhage. This could have been brought on by the shock of the blow, but it could equally well have been coincidental.’

I’ll give Raven this: he knows how to start a chapter in medias res. Perhaps because of this accident, perhaps because he’s always been that way (his motivation is fuzzy throughout; he might be a sociopath), Hugo becomes determined not to take up his place teaching at Baron’s Lodge, and instead goes on a trip around the Mediterranean and Middle East, where he falls in with another Baron’s Lodge old boy, Nigel Palairet, and his wife Nancy, who go jointly into business with Hugo organising gambling-and-sex parties. If this is making you bored, imagine what reading the book itself must feel like.

There are a couple of unexpected murders in the book’s final section. One character starts thinking coldly about the advantages of getting rid of someone, then a few pages later he does it. Then another character suddenly suspects him of having done it and begins to blackmail him. It all feels dreadfully inorganic and fake, and consequently hard to care about. I can see the appeal of an ostensibly ‘literary’ novel that has some of the excesses of trashy pulp fiction thrown in, but I never felt on the right wavelength to enjoy this particular example. At times it feels like a nasty fairy tale, at others a sentimental school story.

From the title and the public-school setting I’d hoped for at least a bit of cricket, and thankfully I did get that. The one genuinely stirring scene in the book, rather too late in the day, relates an innings by James Escome that might have been modelled on Mr Maudsley’s triumphant knock at Brandham Hall in The Go-Between; but it’s not great if the best you can say of a book is that it reminds you of an infinitely superior one.

Strange to say, I’m not discouraged about my Raven plans next year. It may easily be that with a broader canvas and a larger cast there are greater prospects of joy. After ten more books like this, surely I’ll have got the hang of how to read them. Still, a disappointment.

Do try the author’s Guardian obituary. He sounds lively/insufferable (delete as appropriate).

Tags: Anthony Powell, Books, Close of Play, Cricket, Reading, Simon Raven, The Go-Between