Collected Essays. Brian Aldiss
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when it is half-way financially profitable to write SF. (Once upon a time, so the legend goes, you wrote because … well, because it was SF, not because it paid.)
However, whatever Amis’s doubts, he wrote a few SF stories, ‘Something Strange’ being published in The Spectator in 1960, and broadcast on the BBC Third Programme. It bears a family resemblance to my story ‘Outside’. He also edited the Spectrum anthologies with Robert Conquest, and reviewed SF for many years in The Observer—a post later taken over less sympathetically by his son, Martin Amis.
I had an early suspicion regarding Amis’s reading tastes. After the still explosively funny Lucky Jim he wrote That Uncertain Feeling (1955). Both novels were filmed, the latter as Only Two can Play, with Peter Sellers as Lewis, the awful Welsh librarian. (Amis himself appears in the film, hopping nimbly off a double decker bus.)
In That Uncertain Feeling, Amis came out of the closet. Whatever faults Lewis may have, in the way of boozing and chasing skirt, he is redeemed by his addiction to Astounding Science Fiction. Astounding gets two mentions in Chapter Five and one in Chapter Eight. It was about this time that Amis and I first met, to discover how well-versed we were in The Worlds of Nul-A.
Amis’s two SF novels are elegant exercises in their particular subgenres. Russian Hide-and-Seek (1980) is cautionary: ‘If this goes on …’ The Alteration (1976) is an impeccable alternative world.
Incidentally, we observe that when a noted humorist like Amis turns to SF, he becomes rather serious. The Alteration, indeed, centres round the topic of whether a young chorister, Hubert Anvil, should have his testicles removed. The scene is an England which has never renounced Catholicism.
At the end of the drama, contemplating its effects, the American Ambassador to Britain says, ‘When I think of the immensity of the chance …’ Ambassador van den Haag looks down in pity at Hubert Anvil in his hospital bed. He is unable to finish his sentence. Words have failed him.
But that unfinished sentence contains, in a way, the whole substance of the story. Are we to believe that what happens to Hubert is simply malign chance—or could it be the action of a malign God? Accident? Design? Are we reading in The Alteration a further instalment of Kingsley Amis’s depiction of the triumph of the forces of evil, continued from The Anti-Death League and The Green Man? There’s no reason to imagine otherwise.
The Alteration ranks in the succession of Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (1953) and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962). Amis’s novel also has something in common with Harry Harrison’s Tunnel Through the Deeps (1972); both novels depict the United States in globally subsidiary roles. Amis’s New England is Dutch-dominated and rather full of ‘Red Indians’, while Harrison’s America remains a British colony, in which George Washington ranks as a traitor. Harrison receives honourable mention in Amis’s novel: ‘the great Harrison’ is the engineer who has built the railway line between Coverley and Rome, on which Hubert travels in the Eternal City Rapid.
Both Amis’s and Harrison’s novels feature early industrial forms of transport. Against Harrison’s coal-powered airplanes, Amis offers giant dirigibles, the ‘Edgar Allan Poe’ being over one thousand feet long, as the only form of aerial transport. But the jovial tone of Harrison’s alternative world is a far cry from Amis’s grim presentiment of what in New Maps of Hell he dubs a ‘counterfeit world’.
Amis’s major alteration is to display a religion-ruled present very different from what passes as the real one. The England in which his story is set is dominated by the Vatican in Rome. The power of the Catholic Church stretches round the world, as far as Hanoi and Nagasaki. Only the Republic of New England is Protestant. It is to New England that Shakespeare has fled—to die in exile. The main enemy of Christendom is the Ottoman Empire; and the Turks get as far as entering Brussels.
Critics have argued about whether the novel is an attack on Catholicism, or on religion in general or, more generally, on a superpower mentality (rather a safe wicket, you might say, in the 1970s). The Church stands in here for the role played by the conquering Russians in Russian Hide-and-Seek; both prelates and commissars, professing creeds in which they have no belief, represent thuggish oppression. Talents as non-diverse as Beria and Himmler have found refuge in the cloth. A delicate distaste for empty rituals salts both novels. Amis’s universal church has come into being because intelligence and creativity have been beaten down.
His great alterations hinge on a number of historic factors—Martin Luther, instead of being a prime mover in the Reformation, became Pope Germanius I; Henry VIII never got his divorce; the Spanish Armada was not defeated; and so on. Four centuries of near-peace have resulted, in which the powers that be have gradually tightened their grip.
It’s small wonder the American ambassador finds that words fail him when in England. Under the dispensation which he hates, words have lost their value. As one of the plotting clerics puts it, ‘In our world a man does what he’s told, goes where he’s sent, answers what he’s asked’. Even singing becomes another perversion of the voice.
When the story opens, the might of the Church is about to be exercised on the crotch of a ten-year-old choir boy, Hubert Anvil.
Hubert is singing in the choir at the laying-to-rest of King Stephen III of England. It’s a great ceremonial occasion, held in the Cathedral Basilica of Coverley, a magnificent place built by Christopher Wren. There’s irony even here: Coverley, we learn, is Cowley. In our reality, Cowley, a suburb of Oxford, is far from being the home of sanctity. It is the home of one of Britain’s main car manufacturers. But private cars don’t exist in Hubert’s day and age—though there is a hint that Coverley will revert to type.
What does exist is a seemingly decent holy calm over all, in which the arts have a revered place. We might think, to begin with, that this quiet world was a pleasant enough place in which to live. However, Amis follows the general rule in these matters; the tenor of alternative world stories is generally consolatory. We realize as we read that accidents of history—such as the Reformation?—have landed us in a better world than might have been the case (though undoubtedly the writers take pleasure in constructing their reactionary worlds—else why bother?).
So behind the holy calm lies force, behind the present, smothering tradition, behind the arts, cold calculation. Before Hubert Anvil, a decision. Hubert’s beautiful voice will break in a short while. The decision hardly rests in his hands, but in the hands of the manipulative clergy. There is a need for that wonderful high voice of Hubert’s to be preserved. Women may not sing in the churches of Rome. And there is a way by which his voice can be preserved: by a little alteration. He can become rich and famous—but also despised; or he can remain whole, probably obscure, and experience sexual love.
The action aspect of the novel involves Hubert’s attempts to comprehend his predicament and escape from it. Soon enough, he is on the run and being hunted.
And so begins a tug of war, with interesting characters ranged on both sides.
For preserving Hubert’s creative powers as a composer, along with his testicles, are Margaret Anvil, Hubert’s mother, and Father Matthew Lyall, the Anvil family chaplain; unexpected support comes from the American Ambassador, who happens to have a pretty daughter of Hubert’s age. Those who are determined that Hubert should have the operation as soon as possible include Abbot Peter Thynne, Father Dilke (reminiscent of Trollope’s character Obadiah Slope), Tobias Anvil, Hubert’s coldly pious father, and the dead weight of custom. At every step, the cruelty is masked by piety.
When Hubert’s alteration appears to be a foregone conclusion, he is taken to Rome on the Rapid by his father. There they are granted an audience with Pope John XXIV. The Pope, an Englishman (a Yorkshireman), is the most amusing character in a book where humour is generally subdued into irony and satire. After their audience, Tobias and Hubert meet with two ageing castrati, Mirabilis and Viaventosa. Viaventosa breaks down and begs Tobias not to consent to the operation on his son. Otherwise the boy will become the pitiful creature he (Viaventosa) is.
Once away from their