A Review of Fielding Gray by Simon Raven, London, 1967

Bernard   Monday, 30 August 2021

Fielding Gray is one of the best of Simon Raven's many novels (An Inch of Fortune is another) and very rich and juicy it is too.  For all of 'Special Friendships' bittersweet charm that you mention, Raven is arguably better at conveying the full prep-and-public-school experience of so many boys (Peyrefitte is also a wonderful writer, but I can see why his book isn't in print today—it's rather hard to get through, lovely as the sentiments contained therein may be). 
 
Raven writes wonderfully about late '40's and early '50's English public schools—something that not many other writers have done—and Christopher Roland, Fielding's beloved, is not in fact quite as dim as you suggest, just hyper-conventional like so many upper-middle class English boys of the time.  The 'ten minutes of indifferent batting, and an eternity of love' that Fielding experiences, while contemplating his willowy and flannelled young schoolboy friend on the cricket pitch, is just one of many sentences that make this a book to remember.