The Old Devils

Alun Weaver has built a media career performing an exportable, telegenic Welshness — television appearances, a lucrative sideline lecturing on the legacy of the invented dead poet Brydan — while the friends he left behind still live the unglamorous, actual Wales of pub rounds, chapel funerals, and mortgages. His return exposes the gap between Wales-as-brand and Wales-as-daily-fact, and Amis's satire lands as much on the audiences hungry for packaged national identity as on Alun for supplying it to them.

Pubs and drinking rounds structure the novel's days almost literally, and Amis treats alcohol as both things at once: the social glue holding this circle of old friends and old lovers together decades after they've stopped having much else in common, and a slow, undramatic form of self-destruction. The comedy of hangovers and blackouts sits directly beside real bodily failure — strokes, weight, failing hearts — so that what reads at first as pure farce keeps tipping, a chapter later, into something closer to elegy for bodies and marriages both running out of road.

The novel's women get more interior weight than Amis's earlier reputation for comic misogyny might predict, particularly Alun's wife Rhiannon, whom several of the men, including the narrator's closest surrogate, once loved or still do, and whose calm forbearance functions as a quiet rebuke to the men's decades of self-important drinking and grievance-nursing. Old affairs and old resentments resurface with Alun's return not as fresh scandal but as unfinished business finally getting a hearing, and Amis is careful to let the women's long-deferred grievances land with real weight rather than serving merely as backdrop to the men's comic set pieces.

Brydan, the novel's dead poet, is never seen alive and is transparently modeled on Dylan Thomas, but he exists in the book mainly as intellectual property: Alun has built a television and lecture career narrating Brydan's genius to audiences who want charismatic bardic myth more than they want the actual poems. Inventing rather than naming his model lets Amis satirize the whole apparatus of literary-heritage tourism — the professional interpreters, the guided tours of a dead man's haunts — without having to libel a real poet's estate to do it.