It is high summer but in the early mornings you can already sense the first thrilling signs of autumn, the perfect reading season. What a good moment to revisit the enjoyably cruel England of Simon Raven, as described in his matchless series of novels Alms for Oblivion. It is pagan, unjust, beautiful, funny and evocative. It encompasses the melancholy era of national decline, from the last trumpets of empire to the seedy, garish concrete and glass squalor of Ted Heath’s fevered age. It is funny, bitter and full of a surprisingly uninhibited love of this country. It is interested in history, patriotism, courage, money, food, drink and sex, not necessarily in that order. Much (though not all) of the sex takes the form of unadorned lust. Unlike so much modern fiction, it does not more or less ignore the great issues of its time, but plunges boldly into them. I think of it often, even when I am not reading the books: vicious, lithe, boozy, treacherous Angela Tuck, Maisie the principled whore, Tessie Buttock and her grubby, cosy hotel off the Cromwell Road, ruined, ravaged Fielding Gray, brave, beautiful Hetta Frith, honourable Peter Morrison, a last and lingering survivor of the age of chivalry, and devious Somerset Lloyd-James with his lisp, his shameless greed and his yellow bald bonce. There are dozens of others, hilarious, tragic, left-wing and reactionary, cultured and philistine. They carry on for all time, a little like Dickens’s characters, whether you are watching them or not.

Raven’s world, so remote from – yet so similar to – the land in which we now live, is accessible through nine brief and pungent books. I advise skipping one volume, Come Like Shadows, which falls well below the standard of the rest. In fact few of his other books are up to much. But Alms for Oblivion really ought to be on any civilised person’s reading list. You will be relieved afterwards when you return, shocked and educated, to whatever cosy, tasteful banality you generally inhabit. But you will be glad you went into Raven’s darker and more dangerous countryside, and it will not be long before you yearn to pay another visit.

In Raven’s universe, Catullus, not Christ, sets the moral standard and a frank, unapologetic paganism lurks everywhere. Why should we object? We do not often enough consider what the alternative is to our civilisation. That is one of the reasons why we have let it crumble. You certainly do not have to like all that you find. The Furies of the ancient world still roam, taking horrible revenges. You will be surprised how little you mind this. The Kindly Ones appeal to us today because our deep thirst for justice is never really quenched either by the feeble pretence of retribution provided by the secular courts, or by the increasingly vague versions of hell offered to us by the modern Christian church.

We do not often enough consider what the alternative is to our civilisation. That is one of the reasons why we have let it crumble

My favourite of these episodes involves the frustrated woman who stuffs her annoying old mother into a care home, and then promptly has her head sawn off by the first lover she brings back to her – now parent-free – little flat. You have to laugh, as her discarded mother certainly does.

It is more feline than Waugh and perhaps, at the bottom, even more serious. The people, often closely based on real men and women who you can enjoy trying to identify, are drawn lovingly but without mercy. The apparent capriciousness of fate is shockingly but credibly portrayed. Courage, though praised for its nobility, is often penalised with death or disaster. Goodness does not often work out well and can be punished as harshly as evil. Trickery and cynicism are rewarded. There is perhaps rather more homosexuality and self-abuse than you might initially expect, but then, isn’t that true of real life? Above all, the writing is beautiful, so much so that you seldom realise just how skilful it is. And the grosser pleasures of life, the dinner at the Ritz paid for by someone else, the second magnum of Premier Cru Claret, the lavish, stunning doses of Cognac, are as lovingly described as they would be in the expurgated bits of Brideshead Revisited.

I am especially fond of a gluttonous luncheon in a German railway dining car, aboard a train for which death is waiting a little further down the line.

Raven, thank goodness, has not been expurgated. Where would you start? Yet he has, I fear, begun to fade away. You can still buy the Alms for Oblivion books, in chunky anthologies containing three or four novels at once. But does anyone? When I mention his name, few nowadays recognise it.  I confess I do not much like the cover designs of these new volumes, which have not properly caught the raffishness or the fun of the stories. I prefer my tattered, disintegrating 1980s paperbacks. And I still learn new things from each reading, as well as occasionally being moved to tears by their undiluted love of honour and courage and their unusual respect (in these unmilitary, unvirtuous times) for the military virtues. Raven places himself in his books in not very flattering ways, sometimes as the chilly, disillusioned Captain Detterling (he has no Christian name), more often as the tricky, unreliable character called Fielding Gray, given to vanishing when most needed. It is clear that Raven yearns for the densely forested, bibulous, raucous and morally shaky English paradise of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, with beautiful Sophy Western waiting at the end of the story with her forgiving arms wide open. I must assume that he also lived and breathed Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy’, with its stern reminders that we can all expect Death’s equalising scythe, however grand we are, and sooner than we think. Raven was well-acquainted with Death, and did not mind keeping close company with him.

It is a striking paradox that one of the country’s foremost homosexual authors (Raven was in fact sexually omnivorous, but that would not normally prevent his being claimed for the rainbow cause) has not really been taken into the bosom of the gay movement. I think this is because he was never really the Stonewall type. Whenever I urge his works on anybody less than about 70 years old, I am a little worried that they simply will not be able to stand his pre-modern acceptance of sad and bad outcomes, or his cheerful cynicism about almost all sorts of sex. There are, alas, quite a few unacceptable words by today’s standards, but they are what the people involved would actually have said in those times so what are we to do? Some horrible things are said, which make me wince, but I suspect they are a true reflection of how such people spoke, not all that long ago, and it is important that we know it. If we are to believe the sentiments placed in the mouths of some of the finer characters, Raven was a fierce enemy of prejudice long before it was fashionable. But try this, from the opening of The Rich Pay Late (set in 1956) to see if you might like the style, at least: ‘A thick yellow fog was settling into Chancery Lane for the night like a cat into its basket. The lights from the windows opposite shone as from a far country; there was neither sight nor sound of the street below.’

I also cannot get out of my mind this sweet passage from Friends in Low Places just before a necessary and violent death destroys the idyll: ‘So Mark and Isobel were happy amid the growing piles of filth and broken glass. To complain of these gave a zest to love: as did the sullen clouds which were now gathering in the evening sky, for the threat of storm when shelter is near always stirs a delicious thrill of mock anxiety in the stomach.’ The country wedding which is the climax of Friends in Low Places is superficially a ghastly clash between rural England and the raffish London world, and rather well done. But it also is extraordinarily moving, and even more so when the reader is coming round for the second time and knows the ugly, tragic future of the loveable, beautiful couple at the altar.

Reader, if you do not know what luncheon-roll or Cydrax may have been, that is your good fortune

And to set alongside the gourmandising is this description of the hellish cuisine of suburban England just after rationing and well before Elizabeth David. A very wicked man has gone to his parents’ home to try to trick them out of a lot of money. To do so he must put up with this: ‘Mrs Holbrook appeared with a trolley on which were three plates of watery scrambled egg, a dish of thinly-cut luncheon roll, and a flagon of Cydrax. She picked up the whisky decanter, checked the contents and carried it out of the room at arm’s length, like a hospital nurse with a bed-pan.’ Reader, if you do not know what luncheon-roll or Cydrax may have been, that is your good fortune. These things existed and they were not good. The passage stirs such memories of a world which was once very real that it actually makes me shudder.

Why do I return again and again to these novels, even though by now I know know them almost by heart. What is so good about the ten volumes of Alms for Oblivion?  Is it the recurring characters, many of them based on Raven’s own contemporaries at Charterhouse, the school where he got up to the ‘usual thing’ only much more of it than was actually usual? These included Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father William, who became editor of the Times. You have wonder what he had done to Raven to provoke the systematic, sustained and hilarious revenges taken on him in these books. Another was Jim Prior, Margaret Thatcher’s wettest cabinet minister. Jim Prior was so infuriatingly good that Raven tried hard to diminish him but actually failed completely. I have eventually come to think that he is the noblest person in the saga, partly because long ago I knew him slightly and was impressed then and later by his profound decency. But I wonder if Jim was really so relaxed about it all. In a way he (disguised as the independent-minded Tory Peter Morrison) was the pillar of the whole saga, a man of high intelligence, wit, honour and courage who I am rather proud to have met. I once asked him about the books and his part in them. He chortled that they were ‘Just James Bond for p**fs’ (I suspect the word he used, then in normal currency, has become unsayable). The airy dismissal put an end to the discussion. I have always thought he was in fact reluctant to discuss a work in which so much of his private nature was revealed, or to admit the resemblance. His jest is funny, but isn’t at all a fair description of these stories, with their deep, thoughtful recollections of the last months of the Indian empire, of the army as it was and now is not, of occupied Germany and the catastrophe of Suez, that great event which so few now understand or recall.

Towards the end there’s a very touching episode in which a number of unexpected people rally in the defence of England, tradition and beauty, and in which the revolutionaries are shown up fully for the horrors they are. At this point Raven reveals an unexpected love for the King James Bible, gothic architecture and John Bunyan that his often made me wonder what was in his mind at his life’s end. Just because the stories are sometimes absolutely filthy, which they are, does not mean they are not serious. I think it speaks rather well of his old friends that none of them ever tried to sue Raven (at least, not for the way he showed them up in his novels). I wonder if anybody living knows the whole concealed code of the saga. I am sure, each time I read it, that many scores are being settled here, that something is happening which we are not fully aware of and now may never be. But it passes the great tests. It is a joy to read, and you will be a better person for having done so.