Collected Essays. Brian Aldiss

‘Where am I now to find the strength to endure what will be done to this child of mine?’ Such devouring selfishness and hypocrisy finds a strong place in the novel, as it does in the later Russian Hide-and-Seek. It seems that if absolute power corrupts, hypocrisy is one of its chief pimps.

      Even more fervently hypocritical is Abbot Thynne, who schemes to have the altered Hubert glorifying his own church and sing in Coverley, not Rome. It is Thynne who prays to God regarding Hubert to ‘bring it about in Thine own way that he forsake the path of rebellion …’ Does God directly answer this prayer? On that score Amis leaves every reader to decide for himself. Although God does not put in a personal appearance in The Alteration (as he does to scarifying effect in Amis’s horror novel, The Green Man), He certainly makes his presence felt. He is, after all, the head of the Church—or at least its absentee landlord.

      In the midst of his troubles, Hubert has one consolation. He and his friends in the choir school read science fiction, a forbidden kind of gutter literature. He buys his SF from Ned, a stable boy whom Hubert, to his confusion, sees copulating with a country girl.

      Considering the ecclesiastical suspicion of science, it is hardly surprising to find that the term ‘SF’ is unknown. Hubert and friends read ‘TR’—Time Romance—and ‘CW’—Counterfeit World. The boys in their dormitory are reading Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. This delicate tribute reveals that of course Dick’s novel in Hubert’s world is not quite the same as the version we know and love …

      One of Hubert’s friends, Decuman, scoffs, saying that TRs always contain flying machines. But by the end of the book we learn that the Smith brothers in America have achieved flight in a winged machine travelling at a speed of ninety miles an hour (thus saying something about the predictive qualities of SF).

      Part-concealed throughout Amis’s novel lie various references to other works of science fiction: John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes, Keith Roberts’ Pavanne, and Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed. In similar vein, for this is a feature of the game-playing of alternative worlds, one can find references to Ian Fleming’s ‘Father Bond’ stories. We learn that Percy Shelley, ‘a minor versifier’, lived to commit both arson and suicide. Mozart lived to a ripe old age. G. B. Tiepolo has taken the place of Michelangelo, who committed suicide, prompted by Luther’s philistinism. And so on.

      Despite the background of art and music, many of the characters are as indifferent to arts as they are to science. The Pope shrouds his apartment in the Castel Alto with plain hangings, so that he is spared the sight of fine marbles and the Tiepolo ‘Creation’ on the ceiling. I have always regarded this as a particular blasphemy. My own alternative world, The Malacia Tapestry, published in the same year as Amis’s novel, is based on an interpretation of Tiepolo’s magical etchings.

      This contempt by the powerful for the finer things of life is more heavily emphasized in Russian Hide-and-Seek. In the later novel, Shakespeare is decisively rejected by the English—just as here he is excommunicated. Not only words but their sensible orderings have failed. His two novels, so unlike in other ways, dramatize Amis’s feelings of distaste for the way the world was going, as he saw it, in the 1970s, and a fear of the latent evil in men—of which Hubert’s alteration is a small but significantly betraying detail.

      Culture is precious—but is it worth losing your balls for?

      The central motif of Russian Hide-and-Seek is a time-honoured one in SF terms: invasion. Britain, owing to its lack of vigilance, has been taken over by the Russians, and is now a satellite of the Soviet Union. This seems to place the book in the dire warning category of The Battle of Dorking and When the Kissing had to Stop. In 1980, the question carried a freight of topicality.

      But matters are less simple than that. It is part of Amis’s cunning that he does not show us the invasion of the island. Like an Ibsen play, a lot of history has flowed under the bridge before the curtain goes up. We are confronted with a Britain fifty years after the coup. And we are to find that the English have lost both balls and culture.

      The opening is magisterial. A grand English country house is surrounded by pasturage. The son, Alexander, an ensign in the Guards, is vexing his family, and indeed everyone else. The mother worries about flowers and dinner arrangements. We might be embarking on a leisurely nineteenth-century novel. The one blemish to the rural picture seems to be the hundreds of tree stumps which disfigure the grounds of the mansion. That, and the family name, Petrovsky.

      What we at first may assume to be threatened is in fact absolutely overwhelmed. There is no way to undo fifty years of history. This is an England no longer England. It is now the EDR, Soviet-occupied.

      There is nothing futuristic about the EDR. It has been reduced to an imitation of pre-revolutionary Russia. It’s a world of stately country homes with a vengeance, with the English as servants. Parties are thrown, dances are held, and dashing young fellers ride about on horseback. This reversion follows the somewhat similar patterns the victorious Nazis impose on Europe in Sarban’s The Sound of His Horn, which once appeared with an admiring introduction by Kingsley Amis.

      The novel is one of fine surfaces and corrupt interiors. Here is another large house. White-coated servants move about, supplying drink and food. Tennis is in progress on two courts. A small orchestra is playing old-fashioned waltzes. Everything is supposedly done in high style.

      But:

      No one thought, no one saw that the clothes of the guests were badly cut from poor materials … that the women’s coiffures were messy and the men’s fingernails dirty, that the surfaces of the courts were uneven and inadequately raked, that the servants’ white coats had not been properly washed, or that the pavement where the couples danced needed sweeping … No one thought any of that because no one had ever known any different.

      Ignoring the fact that this is rather obtrusive authorial comment, we see embodied here the fine surface/corrupt interior principle on which the novel hinges. To everything there is another aspect.

      Alexander Petrovsky starts like a Henry Fielding hero, young and spirited. He makes a fine impression on readers—and on Commissioner Mets, the power in the land. He impresses Mets by addressing him in good English, the language of the conquered. Alexander has gone to some pains to learn a few useful phrases and to pronounce them properly. ‘But his vocabulary had remained small and his ability to carry on a conversation smaller still.’ Alexander bullies his subordinates. His sexual appetites are gross, and scarcely satisfied when he encounters Mrs Korotchenko, who likes being trampled on before the sexual act, and introduces her twelve-year-old daughter Dasha to join her lusty variety of fun. They perform in a kind of sexual gymnasium.

      If the occupying force is shown as corrupt under its polished veneer, the English are no better. The good ones were killed off in the invasion and the Pacification. Those left are mainly a pack of docile tipplers, devoid of morale and culture, living in a kind of rustic sub-world. It is a dystopia quite as convincing and discomfiting as Orwell’s urban warrens.

      To parallel this total loss of English qualities, the occupying force has lost all belief in its motivating creed, Marxism, which died out about 2020.

      A Moscow-generated New Cultural Policy, ‘Group 31’, plans to restore England to the English.

      Group 31 wish to get Alexander involved. He is willing enough. To be a revolutionary is a great romantic pose which panders to his narcissism. He is callously prepared to assassinate his liberal father, if need be.

      Unexpected deaths follow, yet the underground theme proves less exciting than it should be. What is more interesting, perhaps because more unusual, is the attempt, prompted by Moscow, to launch a performance of a once banned Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet. The play is to be the climax of a festival in which English culture is handed back to the English.

      The Russians do not and cannot care for the past they have obliterated. Nor do the English care—except for a few over fifties, who scarcely count. It is true that they refer to their conquerors as The Shits, but this is a fossil appellation, almost without malice. By such small authentic notes, the