Likely lads in their day

Simon Raven’s first novel, The Feathers of Death, was published in 1959

Simon Raven’s first novel, The Feathers of Death, was published in 1959 when I was in my second year at Cambridge. We fell on it with glee, as I remarked, a few weeks after Raven’s death, to a fellow-novelist, somewhat to her amazement. ‘I’ve never read any of his books,’ she said. ‘I think my husband has.’ Not so surprising perhaps. I doubt if he ever had many devoted female readers. What attracted us to the novel was not so much its for the time decidedly daring story — army officer’s affair with blond, blue-eyed drummer Malcolm Harley — as the tone and style. This was nicely summed up by the Sunday Times reviewer, J. D. Scott, who found it difficult to believe that such an ‘absurdly romantic, preposterously reactionary’ novel should be so worthy of praise. But this of course was just what we loved about it. It appealed to our snobbishness, our champagne tastes. Moreover it was in its way very well-written and an agreeable change from the chippiness of the Irritable Young Men.

Another army novel had made a like impression a couple of years previously: James Kennaway’s Tunes of Glory. In one sense this wasn’t surprising. Most young writers of that generation had served in the forces. What was unusual about Raven and Kennaway was the warmth of their feeling for the army, a warmth which led them to romanticise it. In many ways the novels are very different. Kennaway’s Eton and Sandhurst colonel is destroyed by the man he has supplanted, the former ranker Jock Sinclair who came into the regiment ‘by way of Barlinnie Jail’. Yet both writers respond to the mystique of the army.