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Review
‘Every page sparkles with bitchy quips. Definitely on the gold standard.’ Independent ‘Bravely pushes at the boundaries of satire.’ Sunday Times ‘I was mesmerized by the chapter on Morris junior’s return and the deft psychological glosses Raphael brings to the scene.’ Spectator ‘Raphael shows the vulgarity of Adam’s ambitious contemporaries with chilling accuracy.’ Telegraph
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With a rich cast, a fast-moving story line, and dialogue that displays all the wit and panache for which Frederic Raphael is famous, Fame and Fortune – recently dramatised on BBC Radio 4 – is a powerful sequel to his bestselling classic, The Glittering Prizes. Success as a novelist and Hollywood screenwriter has brought fame and its pleasures to Adam Morris, whose public cynicism continues to mask his private anguish. He still moves warily amongst his ambitious Cambridge contemporaries, but for them, as for him, success has proved a double-edged sword. For Adam, a startling sexual encounter, as well as the defection of his son, Tom, and his brilliant daughter, Rachel, threaten to capsize his complacency and his marriage. In Mrs Thatcher's golden years, money and power can do little to ensure the glittering prizewinners from the trip-wires that lace their upward path – or from the violence and death that stalks and strikes. Frederic Raphael has written more twenty novels, with a variety of settings, from post-war England, Greece during the Civil War, South America in the time of Caudillos, France in the Occupation and today’s United States. He has also written five volumes of short stories, as well as many film and television scripts. He has written biographies of Byron and of W.Somerset Maugham.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This novel revisits the characters from the author's The Glittering Prizes, published thirty-one years previously, and translates them into the late-70s (the previous book was set in the mid-50s / early-60s). The protagonist in both stories is Adam Morris, a clever, witty Jewish writer who went to St John's College Cambridge, writes screenplays and translates classical literature as well as writing novels, has won a Best Screenplay Oscar and has been married to the same woman for much of his life. If you thought that this sounds remarkably like Frederic Raphael, you'd be right, and you could then maybe be forgiven for wondering whether the other characters in these books were also based on real people, and whether the dialogue had anything to do with what the author had said to them or - perhaps more interestingly - what he wished he'd said (I'm reminded of one of the stories in Raphael's Oxbridge Blues, which consists almost entirely of two characters spewing elegant invective at each other and has always struck me - perhaps misguidedly - as arising from some personal sense of quarrelsome resentment on the part of the author).
This isn't a trivial point, because there's an awful lot of dialogue here, and the author has decided to use it to drive the story forward, with minimal scene-setting - or even very much indication of who's speaking. Such allusion can lead to confusion on the part of the reader, because the author's overwhelming desire to have his characters say witty and penetratingly brilliant things *all the time* leads to a uniformity that can obscure any distinction between them. They can also end up speaking what looks like nonsense, as Anna (whom Adam tries "to believe [...] had been, as she had, *the* actress of their Cambridge generation" [p288]) does: "I've found God, you know. Of a kind. The kind that isn't there, and isn't kind."
There's another - more minor - sense in which it appears that the author's less interested in who they are than in what he can make them say. Two characters from the previous book were named Barbara Parks and Francesca Pope; here - apparently because there are two other more prominent characters who also have those Christian names - they're called Shirley and Fay. This is in spite of the fact that little confusion was caused by all four of them being together in the previous novel (Adam Morris even points out on p247 of this book that it's quite possible to know people with the same name in real life). In a similar vein, another character (Bill Bourne) now seems to come from Liverpool, rather than the Birmingham his origins were assigned to in the previous book.
I was slightly annoyed to come across these glitches because I greatly enjoyed The Glittering Prizes (even naively thinking of it, at one point, as a kind of handbook on how to speak and behave once you got to university) and wanted to find out how the characters had turned out. This is an entertaining, smart account of what they ended up saying to each other, but seems to have been constructed without any affection for them, or any apparent feeling for what they were supposed to be.
This isn't a trivial point, because there's an awful lot of dialogue here, and the author has decided to use it to drive the story forward, with minimal scene-setting - or even very much indication of who's speaking. Such allusion can lead to confusion on the part of the reader, because the author's overwhelming desire to have his characters say witty and penetratingly brilliant things *all the time* leads to a uniformity that can obscure any distinction between them. They can also end up speaking what looks like nonsense, as Anna (whom Adam tries "to believe [...] had been, as she had, *the* actress of their Cambridge generation" [p288]) does: "I've found God, you know. Of a kind. The kind that isn't there, and isn't kind."
There's another - more minor - sense in which it appears that the author's less interested in who they are than in what he can make them say. Two characters from the previous book were named Barbara Parks and Francesca Pope; here - apparently because there are two other more prominent characters who also have those Christian names - they're called Shirley and Fay. This is in spite of the fact that little confusion was caused by all four of them being together in the previous novel (Adam Morris even points out on p247 of this book that it's quite possible to know people with the same name in real life). In a similar vein, another character (Bill Bourne) now seems to come from Liverpool, rather than the Birmingham his origins were assigned to in the previous book.
I was slightly annoyed to come across these glitches because I greatly enjoyed The Glittering Prizes (even naively thinking of it, at one point, as a kind of handbook on how to speak and behave once you got to university) and wanted to find out how the characters had turned out. This is an entertaining, smart account of what they ended up saying to each other, but seems to have been constructed without any affection for them, or any apparent feeling for what they were supposed to be.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Being a big fan of the original "Glittering Prizes"-particularly the television series which was the original format-the novel quickly followed-I looked forward to reading this sequel-which in turn is adapted from the Radio series which Raphael agreed to after the concept was rejected for TV by the BBC. As with it's predecessor, the dialogue is at times dazzling. I'm afraid I found Adam Morris less convincingly different from his creator than in "TGP" and somewhat smug and self satisfied. The book works superficially, but lacks real emotional depth. Raphael has a unique talent, which might eventually pass the world by (as he nervously hints in this novel) without managing to pull off a major enduring literary success.
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Always feel that Frederic Raphael writes'tongue in check'Adam has too be so like Frederic in all that he does. Sarah,his daughter who died in 2000?,must have bought memories for him when he was writing about Rachael.This is an enjoyable book,full of wit, and pithy sword play between the various characters that appear,and have appeared in 'The Glittering Prizes,that appeared in both and TV format many years ago.Jews and Jewishness appears as the major theme,as it does in his previous novel. This is a good and enjoyable read,well worth the effort, and in this novel Raphael does not become too verbose,which often detracts from his work,as constant reference to a dictionary is required.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Fame and Fortune - Frederic Raphael
I bought the book "Fame and Fortune" from Amazon UK after much enjoying the DVD of the excellent TV series "Glittering Prizes", based on the book of the same name, to which "Fame... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Martini
A sequel too far
This is the sequel to the Glittering Prizes, but unfortunately is very much an inferior tale. Raphael has tended to make the characters even more unlikeable than they were in the... Read more
Published on 5 July 2009 by Denis Parry
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