The old Adam

Final Demands is the third volume in Frederic Raphael’s trilogy, which began with the publication of The Glittering Prizes in 1976.

Final Demands is the third volume in Frederic Raphael’s trilogy, which began with the publication of The Glittering Prizes in 1976. The second in the series, Fame and Fortune, did not follow until 2007; and showed a distinct shift in mood — a silting up of bitterness and disdain.

In The Glittering Prizes, Raphael was more tenderly ambiguous towards the ambitions of his characters. Perhaps this is because their obvious faults (and particularly those of his central character, Adam Morris) are so forgivable in the young. They are evidence of youthful insecurity: all that striving for effect, the exhausting and competitive badinage, the nervous one-upmanship, the pretentiousness, the chippiness. Adam’s hypersensitivity about his Jewishness (as another character points out, he’s always the first to bring it up) is particularly touching: it is obvious that he is unsure not only how much or how little it might mean to others, but how much or how little it means to him.

When undergraduates are not pretentious, they are often would-be ironic — undercutting their own over-reaching. Their brand of cynicism is as naive as credulity. Just down from Cambridge, Adam’s film-making friends, Mike Clode and Bruno Lazlo, want to make ‘a film that says it all about the futility of London — ambition and success and money.’ ‘All the things we want,’ as Adam points out.

The hypocrisies of the young are more ebullient and more poignant than those of middle age. By Fame and Fortune, Adam has the fame and the money; and has sold out. He is still chasing after the false gods he satirises — ‘the shit at the end of the rainbow’, as his youthful self blithely put it.