The Glittering Prizes, by Frederic Raphael

I have read some very good books recently. But you don't need me to tell you that Anna Karenina is excellent, or that Max Porter's oeuvre might be worth your time. Instead, I'm going to tell you about a book that is not terribly good, namely The Glittering Prizes by Frederic Raphael.

Despite its failings, there are a couple of interesting points about TGP. The first is the way in which it not that good. If a book is not very good then (in general) that's because it just falls down across the board: premise, plot, characters, description, dialogue. Genre fiction (a whodunnit or sci fi) is allowed to have a great premise or a good plot and fail to deliver elsewhere, but TGP is standard-issue literary fiction and therefore should be strong in all areas. However, TGP is not a failure across the board - on the contrary, it has a notable strength, as I set out below.

The second interesting point about TGP is what it does (and doesn't) tell us about the world it so clearly sets out to encapsulate. More by omission than by what it includes, it tells us something about how things used to be.

I have no idea how I first heard of TGP - the book was old when I was born - but somehow I had heard of it, and when I saw it in a secondhand bookshop recently it triggered a dim memory. I picked it up, it looked fun from the blurb and I bought it. And in some ways it is quite fun.

The book is about some terribly brilliant clever witty sparkling Cambridge undergraduates of the 1950s and their lives after university. We are, I am afraid to say, forcibly reminded of Evelyn Waugh, chronicler of the undergraduates of the 1920s: again we have a generation too young to fight the big war of their times but determined to have fun instead. There is even an episode involving some posh Catholics, which is a little embarrassing and I will not dwell on it: suffice it to say that Raphael is not Waugh and he should not have invited the comparison.

Raphael himself was born in 1931 and went to Cambridge so we are clearly in 'write what you know' territory, and that brings me onto my first criticism of the book: it is terribly self-regarding. The first character we meet, Adam Morris, is an obvious stand-in for the author. Indeed, it is so obvious that I correctly guessed the school that Raphael went to from the description of Adam's fictional school. (Charterhouse, if you're interested, and I never thought I would spot a fictional reference to Charterhouse.) 

We meet Adam while he is still in the Sixth Form but, in the space of a few pages, we learn that he has just won a Major Scholarship to Cambridge, which he has achieved despite struggling against anti-semitism, and that he has a very pretty girlfriend who wears a tight angora sweater, has redder lips than the other girls of 1952 and calls him a genius. As we go through the book, Adam becomes very rich and successful, while continuing to be attractive to women, but is nonetheless also a really great guy who is motivated by good intentions and says a lot of very clever things (I'll come back to that last bit). In fact, as I write this, it occurs me to wonder whether Raphael was making fun of himself in writing Adam, but that wasn't how it seemed as I read the book.

Adam is just one character in an ensemble piece, picking up the stories of other terribly brilliant clever witty sparkling people as we go through their lives. And that brings me to the next problem with the book, which is that I found it hard to work out quite what these people were doing or why. 

I accept that that sort of thing sometimes happens to me: as I was reading The Idiot, for example, I occasionally lost track of who a character was or what time of day it was meant to be. But the problem is somehow more fundamental with TGP, a naturalist modern-day novel with a small cast, than with a sprawling Russian novel with a cast of thousands. As I read TGP, I couldn't always work out who was meant to be in love with whom, for example, and that seems a bit odd to me.

Here's an example of what I mean. The most successful episode of the book, in my view, is the section called "A Country Life". The background to this is that a chap called Alan impregnates his Cambridge girlfriend, Joyce, who then marries Dan, who brings up Alan's child as his own. Although Dan is every bit as clever witty sparkling and talented as Alan, Dan wants to live a quiet and impoverished life as a teacher in the middle of nowhere, and Joyce is happy to go along with that. But, a few years later, Alan, now wildly successful, rich and urbane, turns up with his glamorous new wife to check on his (biological) child, try to seduce his old girlfriend and so on. 

Once one has swallowed the premise, it's a pretty good (albeit rather soap-operatic) set-up for a story, and Raphael does some good work with it. Alan turns up, turns heads and showers money and stardust over the poor rural couple. He even gives them a television. And eventually his old girlfriend Joyce who (in case you had forgotten) is also terribly brilliant clever and talented, asks him for a job and so he gives her the chance to be brilliant clever and talented on his television programme (interviewing Adam about his new book, natch). 

The episode ends with Dan sitting at home alone after having been out shooting, turning on the television (remember - a gift from Alan) to watch Joyce on Alan's programme. These are the closing words of the section: "After a time, he closed the gun with a practised snap of the wrist, took aim and, without any change in his expression, shot his wife." 

So what happened? I know Dan didn't actually shoot his wife: she's off in London being intelligent on television. It is not meant literally. So did he shoot his television? Wouldn't that be rather messy? And he is this decent guy who has been bringing up another man's child for years and now bites his lip as his wife seems to be leaving him ... I get that he's under pressure, but he just doesn't seem the sort of chap to fire guns at expensive electronics inside the house. And what would he tell Joyce when she got back? So maybe he just pretended to shoot the television? Bit less exciting, I suppose, but more realistic. But the point is that I just don't know what he actually did.  

I see from my copy of the book that it was made into a TV series starring Tom Conti (presumably Raphael cast Conti as Adam). If I had seen it then I would know what happened to poor old Dan's television. But I feel that I shouldn't have to watch the adaptation of a book to find out the basic facts about what happened in it.

But - and it's a very big but - the TV adaptation brings me onto the great strength of this book, and one of reasons why you might well want to read it - the dialogue. As you might have spotted, Raphael decided that his characters are all terribly brilliant clever witty sparkling people - but he makes good on this promise by giving them dialogue to match. Indeed, it is some of the most consistently high quality repartee-ish dialogue you will see. Probably even better on television than on the page, but still great to read.

The undergraduate conversation is brilliant, but of course we were all brilliant when we were undergraduates. Raphael's characters carry on being brilliant afterwards. Here's Adam talking about the State of Israel (he's the second person to speak in the excerpt):

That line about gypsies and the violin is hard to beat, but you can see that Raphael gives Adam quite a few zingers - so many, in fact, that the force of what he has to say about gypsies is rather lost in the midst of the one-liners.

That bit is pretty one-sided - it's just Adam verbally beating up the Auschwitz survivors for laughs - but Raphael has plenty of two-sided zinger-strewn dialogue, even in unlikely situations. At one point, Adam goes to interview an unrepentant fascist - but Raphael gives the fascist a tremendous number of good lines. When Adam goes to a shop and chats up his brother's girlfriend, everyone in the shop is a wit with an instant comeback. One section of the book involves some academics setting up a new university, and each academic and student participates in relentless and ferocious repartee. 

Later on, Adam has a drink with his old friend Anna (also clever brilliant talented etc), who tells him that her husband cheats on her and that she is an alcoholic, and asks to borrow £100. It's rather a sad occasion. But that doesn't mean the conversation falters. On the contrary:

'Have you thought about a psychiatrist?' he said.

'They don't lend people money.'

...

Adam said: 'Anna, look, there isn't any problem about a hundred quid as such.'

'A hundred quid as such is all I want.'

'You need help,' Adam said.

'And that's the form I'd like it to take.'

'I care about you.'

'Then is it a deal?'

There is something reminiscent of Aaron Sorkin about this kind of artificial but clever dialogue. But Raphael aims higher than Sorkin - he is trying to hit some emotional targets that Sorkin is not really interested in - and sometimes he hits them.

So there you have it: TGP is not all bad. It has page after page of this kind of thing. If you like it then you might be prepared to overlook the shortcomings I outlined above and read it just to enjoy the dialogue.

I have one final point to make about TGP - about what is not in it. 

As I said above, the book is intended to be a portrait of the elite of a particular generation. We hear a lot about generations nowadays: the Boomers (hoaders of unearned wealth), Generation X, Generation Y, Generation Z, Xennials (analogue childhood, digital adulthood), Millenials (bunch of snowflakes) - I get confused by exactly who is who and what the stereotypes for each generation are - but Raphael and his cohort are in none of those famous generations. They are the generation known in the US as the Silent Generation: not the people who fought in the war, nor the noisy Boomers who came of age in post-war abundance, but a squeezed set of in-between people. That's an interesting place to be. 

By and large, Raphael's generation are the people who produced what the Boomers consumed. I mentioned that at one point in TGP our characters are setting up a new university, i.e. one of the new universities attended by the kinds of Boomers who were the first in their families to go to university. We are also talking about the likes of George Martin, the Beatles producer (born 1926), and Mary Quant (1930); in the world of novels, JG Ballard (1930), Beryl Bainbridge (1932), Malcolm Bradbury (1932) and David Lodge (1935); in art, Bridget Riley (1931) and Peter Blake (1932). 

At this point you may be thinking that these are slim pickings for an entire generation. But now let's turn to politics. Margaret Thatcher (1925), Nigel Lawson (1932), Shirley Williams (1930), Bill Rodgers (1928) and Rupert Murdoch (1931) were at Oxford, and David Steel (1938) and Roy Hattersley (1932) were not at Oxbridge, but here is a selective list of Chairmen of the Cambridge University Conservative Association from the 1950s, starting in Lent 1951: Geoffrey Howe, Douglas Hurd, John Biffen and Tam Dalyell (he joined the Labour Party after Suez). A little later in the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s the CUCA Chairmen were, in this order: Leon Brittan, Peter Viggers, Norman Fowler, Peter Temple-Morris, John Selwyn Gummer, Ken Clarke and then Hugh Dykes, with Norman Lamont following a few terms later. Hurd, Brittan, Gummer and Michael Howard were also Presidents of the Cambridge Union during this period, as were Norman St John-Stevas (Easter 1950) and Grenville Janner (Lent 1952). David Owen was at Cambridge in the 1950s too, and no doubt many others I have forgotten too.

I said that this generation - Raphael's generation - produced what the Boomers consumed, but perhaps the biggest thing it produced was the political landscape of the country. Moreover, not only was this generation the one that dominated politics for so long, but Cambridge had an unusually high share in its production (I say "unusually" given Oxford's historic dominance in producing politicians). 

But what do we learn about these giants of politics from TGP? Nothing. Raphael leaves politics aside. His book is about Cambridge undergraduates of the 1950s who went on to claim the glittering prizes of life, but he does not include the politicians who dominated the age. I appreciate that his title is slightly ironic: these people's lives didn't always turn out quite as their sparkling brilliant talented youthful selves would have wished. But surely it is remarkable that Raphael does not mention any of his contemporaries who did in fact grasp the glittering prizes. 

It's not that his characters have no interest in what we might call Issues with a capital I. Anti-semitism and racism come up, for example. It's just that the pursuit of politics is of no interest to them. 

I find that quite striking. It would probably now be unthinkable that one could try to encapsulate a generation without politics being a big part of what that generation is about. And so TGP reminds us of a gentler age - 1976, to be precise, when it was first published - in which a generation could pursue successful, rich and varied lives without letting politics get in their way. A vanished world, you might think. Or perhaps a glittering prize we should aim to recapture?