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Alms for Oblivion Vol. II fdgkL (Read now) Alms for Oblivion Vol. II. Online [fdgkL.ebook] Alms for Oblivion Vol. II. Pdf Free Simon Raven audiobook | *ebooks | Download PDF | ePub | DOC Download Now Free Download Here Download eBook #2409065 in Books 2012-05-01Format: International EditionOriginal language:EnglishPDF # 1 7.80 x 1.46 x 5.08l, 1.11 #File Name: 0099561336848 pages | File size: 27.Mb Simon Raven : Alms for Oblivion Vol. II. before purchasing it in order to gage whether or not it would be worth my time, and all praised Alms for Oblivion Vol. II.: 1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Brilliantly comic, sharp and bitingBy J C E HitchcockApart from ldquo;Sound the Retreatrdquo;, set in 1945-6, the novels in this volume advance Simon Ravenrsquo;s ldquo;Alms for Oblivionrdquo; sequence through the sixties and into the seventies. ldquo;The Judas Boyrdquo; is set in 1962. Tom Llewyllyn, now a producer at the BBC, commissions his friend Fielding Gray, now a writer, to make a documentary about the Cypriot independence struggle, a conflict in which Gray himself took part and was injured. On arrival on Cyprus, however, Fielding discovers that there are powerful forces, among them Somerset Lloyd-James (now an MP) and the American spy Earle Restarick, who have secrets to hide and are determined to prevent his programme from being made.Although the sequence makes use of the device of recurring characters, Raven uses a wide variety of settings, both in terms of geography and in terms of subject-matter. ldquo;Places Where They Singrdquo;- the title is taken from an instruction in the Book of Common Prayer- is a ldquo;campus novelrdquo; set against a background of student radicalism in the Cambridge of 1967. The academic Robert Constable, who appeared in all the five previous novels in a supporting role, here takes centre stage. As Provost of Lancaster College he has to deal with the attempts of various revolutionary student groups to provoke violent protests on the college premises. (Lancaster College is obviously based upon Kingrsquo;s College where Raven studied himself. Kingrsquo;s was founded by Henry VI, who was a member of the House of Lancaster). Among the other college dons are Llewyllyn and the mathematician Daniel Mond who was the hero of ldquo;The Sabre Squadronrdquo;.If its predecessor was a ldquo;campus novelrdquo;, ldquo;Sound the Retreatrdquo; can be seen as falling into two other literary genres, the tale of army life and the chronicle of the British Raj. To be more precise, this is (like Paul Scottrsquo;s ldquo;Jewel in the Crownrdquo; sequence) a chronicle of the last days of the Raj, because the action takes place between November 1945 and June 1946, a few months after the events of ldquo;Fielding Grayrdquo;, and not long before India and Pakistan were to become independent. The protagonist is Peter Morrison, the former schoolmate of Gray and Lloyd-James and future Tory MP. He arrives in India as an officer cadet and, after receiving his commission as a second lieutenant, finds himself having to deal with the clashes between Hindus and Muslims during the events leading up to independence. This story sheds some interesting light on Morrisonrsquo;s character, revealing him to be more devious, and perhaps less straightforwardly honourable, than he appears in some of the chronologically later installments.ldquo;Come like Shadowsrdquo; moves the action forward to 1970. Once again the protagonist is Gray, who is employed to write the script for a movie version of ldquo;The Odysseyrdquo;. This task takes him to Corfu where the film is being shot and where he again tangles with his old enemy Restarick.In the earlier stories in the sequence Ravenrsquo;s satire was mostly aimed at the British Establishment and at the upper and upper-middle classes. In this volume, however, it takes on a more distinctly conservative tone. The volume also contains an introductory essay, written by Raven in the 1990s, in which he deplores that decadersquo;s culture of political correctness, and much of his acid wit in these novels is turned on the forces of the Left. In this he has much in common with Evelyn Waugh, another writer who bitterly satirised British society from an essentially conservative position, although in Ravenrsquo;s case, unlike Waughrsquo;s, that position was not explicitly religious.This conservatism is most in evidence in ldquo;Places Where They Singrdquo; and ldquo;Come like Shadowsrdquo;; in both novels Raven takes on the modish leftism of the late sixties and early seventies. In ldquo;Places Where They Singrdquo; he can be seen as putting forward a system of positive values much more than he did in the earlier books. Lancaster College stands for tradition, continuity and intellectual freedom, values being put at risk the revolutionary fanaticism of the radical students, whose ideology Raven sees as something essentially negative and destructive. In ldquo;Come like Shadowsrdquo; Ravenrsquo;s target is again the radical left, in this case the left-wing actress Sasha Grimes (a thinly disguised portrait of Vanessa Redgrave) and the American students who control the Foundation which is funding the film and are trying to convert it into Marxist propaganda. As screenwriter, Gray finds himself having to resist not only their demands but also those of the producer Foxy Galahead who wants to turn Homer into a vulgar commercial blockbuster.I have to say that ldquo;The Judas Boyrdquo; is not the best installment in the series; Raven obviously had a weakness for writing about cloak-and-dagger espionage, but never did so very convincingly. I was also unconvinced by his thesis that the protests against British rule in Cyprus were all whipped up, for obscure reasons, by American agitators. The other three novels printed here, however, are all well up to the standards set in the first volume. Parts of ldquo;Sound the Retreatrdquo; may be in dubious taste- at one point it verges on the pornographic- but overall it is a powerful, stinging indictment of the military and administrative chaos which accompanied the British retreat from India, and contains one of Ravenrsquo;s most memorable characters in the shape of Gilzai Khan, the army officer turned political agitator.When I was at Cambridge in the 1980s the official Great Cambridge Satirical Novel was Tom Sharpersquo;s ldquo;Porterhouse Bluerdquo;; every undergraduate (including myself) seemed to have read it, but nobody (including myself) seemed to have heard of ldquo;Places Where They Singrdquo;. Having now read both novels I can say that I prefer Ravenrsquo;s, more brilliantly comic, more biting and sharper than Sharpersquo;s. ldquo;Come like Shadowsrdquo; is probably the funniest account I have ever read about film-making. I canrsquo;t wait to read the final two novels in the sequence. Simon Raven's sequence of colourful and funny novels about the English upper-class misbehaving continues against a backdrop of intrigue in Athens, radicalism in Cambridge, turmoil in India and movie-making in Corfu. Dazzlingly witty and thoroughly depraved, Raven's world is also a dark mirror to our times - one that is sure to make you blush, shriek, laugh out loud and always read on. Volume 2: The Judas Boy, Places Where they Sing, Sound the Retreat and Come Like Shadows "Raven has the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel" * Guardian * "An extraordinary novelist...magnificent" * Mail on Sunday * "A ready made cult waiting to be discovered" * Spectator * "Confident, worldly-wise, insolently comic... a highly entertaining narrative style" * Sunday Times * "Turn to Raven and revel in his mischievious, malicious world" * Observer *About the AuthorAuthor Simon Raven was perhaps known as much for his controversial behaviour as for his writing. He grew up reading and studying the classics, translating them from Greek and Latin into English and vice-versa. He was expelled from Charterhouse School in 1945 for homosexual activities, having first been seduced at the age of nine by the games master (an experience he described as giving 'immediate and unalloyed pleasure") and went on to join the army. Following his National Service, Raven attended King's College, Cambridge to read English. Raven later returned to the army but was asked to resign rather than face a court-martial for 'conduct unbecoming.' It was at this point that he turned his focus to writing. The publisher Anthony Blond paid Raven to write and to move away from London to Deal, Kent. His works span a multitude of genres including fiction, drama, essays, memoirs and screenplays. Simon Raven died in May 2001, having written his own epitaph: "He shared his bottle - and, when still young and appetising, his bed." [fdgkL.ebook] Alms for Oblivion Vol. II. By Simon Raven PDF [fdgkL.ebook] Alms for Oblivion Vol. II. By Simon Raven Epub [fdgkL.ebook] Alms for Oblivion Vol. II. By Simon Raven Ebook [fdgkL.ebook] Alms for Oblivion Vol. II. By Simon Raven Rar [fdgkL.ebook] Alms for Oblivion Vol. II. By Simon Raven Zip [fdgkL.ebook] Alms for Oblivion Vol. II. By Simon Raven Read Online.
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