Fame and Fortune

Fame and Fortune is the long-awaited continuation of Frederic Raphael’s best-selling novel The Glittering Prizes, which followed a generation of Cambridge graduates into the academic and media world of the 1960s. In this new book, Successful novelist and screenwriter Adam Morris, now in his late forties, remains the central character, but many of his contemporaries continue to feature in his life. These include the ambitious and endlessly scheming movie director Mike Clode; the Australian-born TV star Alan Parks, who now seems to front every other serious or semi-serious program on TV; and Joyce Hadleigh, whose career  on TV Alan has fostered—just as years earlier at Cambridge, he fathered her child whom Dan Bradley, now a primary school headmaster in Wandsworth, raised as his own. The vivid complexity of Fame and Fortune reflects not only the nature of London life in the era of Margaret Thatcher but also the changing attitudes and lifestyles of a younger generation. Adam and his wife Barbara find themselves faced with the defection of their son, Tom, to a Christian sect that leads him to drop out of university and desert his family a situation that is compounded, with disconcerting consequences, when their beautiful, successful daughter Rachel meets Adam’s college friend Bill Bourne, the son of a scouse docker, now a professor in California. In varying ways, the other characters too discover the fragility of the success and happiness they had enjoyed, as violence and death play cruel, sudden parts in their lives.