Life in the West. Brian Aldiss
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Life in the West
THE SQUIRE QUARTET
Brian Aldiss, OBE, is a fiction and science fiction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. He was born in Norfolk in 1925. After leaving the army, Aldiss worked as a bookseller, which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). His first published science fiction work was the story ‘Criminal Record’, which appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. Since then he has written nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories, many of which are being reissued as part of The Brian Aldiss Collection.
Several of Aldiss’ books have been adapted for the cinema; his story ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’ was adapted and released as the film AI in 2001. Besides his own writing, Brian has edited numerous anthologies of science fiction and fantasy stories, as well as the magazine SF Horizons.
Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society and in 2000 was given the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Aldiss was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2005. He now lives in Oxford, the city in which his bookselling career began in 1947.
Brian Aldiss
Life in the West
Dedication
Life in the West is dedicated to other
Distinguished Persons
Chen, David, Iris, Maysie, and Michael
by no means forgetting Felix, Elena, Derek, and Janet
to show them what one of their number was up to
before we sampled life in the East
and walked the Great Wall together
Contents
Life in the West
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Prelude
1 The International Congress
2 Flattery and Higher Foolishness
3 A View from the Beach
4 Conversation with ‘Drina’s’
5 She’s Only a Sex Symbol
6 Putting our Socialist Friends to Rights
7 Land Full of Strange Gods
8 Sublimated Coin Warfare
9 How to Get to Ostrow Lomelsky
10 Slatko
11 ‘The Strong Act as They Have Power to Act’
12 Tribal Customs
13 Illegal Currency Charges
14 An Ideological Decision
Acknowledgments
THE SQUIRE QUARTET
Copyright
About the Publisher
Epigraph
I walked beside a sea aflame,
An animal of land. The fire
Of stars knocked at my earthbound frame:
East of grapples West, man maid, hope Fate;
All oppositions emanate
From constellations of desire.
Burning below hair, flesh, and teeth,
An image of the Bright Ones lies,
A lantern hid in bone. Beneath
That vision, teeth and hair begin
Again; wolf grins to wolfish grin
As smile I in my lover’s eyes.
Too soon that love with false-bright hair
Is dead: the house stands silent. I
Fare forth across the world’s despair,
Its muteness, oratory, and banners,
To seek not truth but modern manners.
The head must win what heart let die.
Introduction
When I began to write the Squire Quartet my intention was to portray something of the world I was living in, from the 1980s onwards. I found most of that world exciting – enticing to experience and to record.
This, the first volume of the Squire Quartet, brisk and chatty, was published on March 6th 1980 – as a loving card from my wife, still tucked into her copy of the book, reminds me. We were living on a quiet North Oxford street and our younger children were seriously into education. We were always moving house, depending on our fortunes.
I had been attending a conference in Palermo – a conference with a strong Communist flavour, not particularly enjoyable. It was over. I was standing on the dockside, looking north over the sea. A story began to build up in my mind: the conference; the players from various countries, where the economic blocs seemed irreconcilable; and at the same time, a man’s – Sir Thomas C. Squire’s – difficulties at home.
Once I returned to our house in Charlbury Road, I launched into the novel. My mother died during that period; a melancholy event recorded when Squire’s mother dies just before Christmas. You have to go on, whatever happens. Maybe the army taught me that. Or maybe I had known it even as a small boy. Anyhow, Squire also has to press on. Trouble in Yugoslavia, where he is almost killed. Separation from Teresa, his wife. More human experience, more meditation. More striving to penetrate the thickets.
The novel opens with Squire in Ermalpa, Sicily, for a conference on the popular arts, dubbed ‘the arts of no refinement’. He claims that the pop art of one generation becomes the classic of the next: ‘Homer was, in his day, the Bronze Age equivalent of the TV soap opera.’ Squire is for the new, insisting we rise up to change.
Later, back at his Norfolk house, Pippet Hall, Squire is filming and being filmed. The traditional pretty girl in a swimsuit is with him. He remarks, ‘We are all symbols to each other as well as real people.’
It is the period of the Cold War – much discussion takes place. Squire and his wife quarrel bitterly.
Squire recalls a note given to him in Ermalpa, in which Vasili Rugorsky, the friendly Russian, proposes they visit Nontreale’s cathedral and that Squire pay the bus fare: ‘our government keeps us poor as saints.’
They get to Nontreale and enter the cathedral. Rugorsky praises the elaborate artwork. He says to the unimpressed Squire, ‘Without God, I can see no meaning in anything.’
‘Do you ever experience the feeling that you have come to a dead halt in your life?’ Rugorsky asks.
So the questioning goes on, the faltering marriage, the symbols, the seasons, life itself …
Brian Aldiss
Oxford, 2012
Prelude
Spring 1977
A period in the history of the West known as the late nineteen-seventies. One of the milder inter-glacial periods, when textbooks describe the North European climate as ‘pleasantly cool and damp’.
Over the European Economic Community, eight o’clock of