Brian Aldiss, ‘Life in the West’ (1980)
It’s not science fiction, this novel, although it includes some discussion of science fiction, and a few glancing SF-ishnesses. Life in the West is a contemporary-set novel of ideas. The strategy by which Aldiss presents these ideas is: having his various characters lecture at one another, and us, about them, at great length, as well as discussing them, these ideas, earnestly over drinks or meals, walking by the seashore, or in bed. The setting is an academic conference in Sicily: the First International Congress of Intergraphic Criticism at ‘Ermalpa’, a rather awkward almost-anagram of Palermo, I suppose. The guest of honour is Thomas C Squire, founder of the Society for Popular Aesthetics: handsome, middle-aged writer and presenter of Frankenstein Among the Arts, a TV series after the manner of James Burke’s Connections or Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation (‘Mr Squire’ says one character: ‘your television series, and the book, does for the culture of today what Lord Clarke’s Civilisation did for the past!’)
Chapters set at the conference follow Squire’s interactions with the other conference attendees: French academic Jacques d’Exiteuil, an old friend; Italian animal behaviour expert Carlo Morabito (he stalks Squire somewhat, and reveals that he travelled to England the previous year and took long-distance photos of Squire’s Georgian home, his wife and two daughters — photos he is keen to show Squire); two critics from the USSR — as it then was — called Rugorsky and Kchevov; and Selina Ajdini, ‘a small dark Italian lady, the conference secretary.’ Squires spends much of the novel trying to get into bed with the toothsome Ajdini.
Aldiss reproduces the various conference talks verbatim, pretty much; and notes down all the conversations delegates have with one another, about culture, religion, politics, evolution, the Cold War, the future. In this, Aldiss was ahead of David Lodge, whose much lighter and more digestible novel of the academic conference circuit, Small World wasn’t published until 1984.
Interspersed with the 1978-set conference chapters are flashback chapters, set in England and Singapore in 1977, whilst Squire is making his Frankenstein Among the Arts programme, monologues from which are liberally quoted in the text. Squire is having an affair with one of the actresses from the show, considerably younger than he. Squires’ wife Theresa discovers and is not happy, threatening to leave him: there are rows and upbraidings. Squires worries he may lose his fancy East Anglian country house and be denied access to his children. These portions of the novel give us further details of Squire’s backstory: the traumatic death of his father (drunk one night and stumbling about, the old man tripped over his two mastiffs, who then savaged him to death — young Squires discovers the body in the morning); his various affairs with women; his time, post-war as a spy in 1948 Jugoslavia,
Nothing very much happens in the main timeline of the novel, and little is resolved by its end. Squires does manage a quick fumble with Ajdini (‘He began to kiss her, pressing closer … He lay on top of her, eyes closed. She ceased to move …. Gradually, she stirred. “I must go, Tom dear. I won’t stay” [272]) but nothing comes of it: she’s not in the mood, and leaves. Alone again, he contemplates his life, the wife from whom he is now separated, his future. He does a bit of yoga. ‘With placid amusement he detached himself from his body, rising above it to see a man, recently embraced by a woman, standing in still posture, mind clear of logical thought.’
What was he going to do next? How was the rest of his life to be lived? He thought of the sailing ship moored at the harbour. There was no escape, only the appearance of escape. That depended who else was in the boat with him. The opportunity to begin again often presented itself. But the blowfly in the human heart ensured that one went on making the old mistakes. [276]
So no escape for Squires. And in fact we do find out something of what happens to him, in the three lengthy novels Aldiss wrote as follow-ups: Forgotten Life (1988), Remembrance Day (1993) and Somewhere East of Life (1994). More than 1000 pages in all. Squires appears in these as a side-character, and in the last of them the story moves into a near-future SFnal story. Failing marriages, masculine insecurity, sex. The ‘Squires Quartet’.
Anthony Burgess, who picked Life in the West as one of his Ninety-Nine Novels: the Best in English since 1939 (1984), praised it for its ‘vital dialectic’ and ‘rounded characters’. I wasn’t persuaded by the latter, particularly, I must say. Most of the novel’s characters are here, like the various talking heads in Mann’s Magic Mountain, to embody and present different points of view, different philosophical and political perspectives, and are no more characterised as people than that. Squires is a little better drawn, although, as Christopher Priest once said about this novel, he’s really a roman-à-clef Brian Aldiss, and the various to-ings and fro-ings, in amongst the debating and monologuing, are Aldiss writing into fiction his own experiences of writerly conferences and SF conventions.
The translations into fiction — Squires a TV presenter rather than a novelist, a postwar spy rather than, as Aldiss was, a serving soldier in the Far East during the war — enable him to evade direct autobiography, although they introduce distortions as well. The shoot-out in Jugoslavia described in chapter 10 evidently draws on Aldiss’s wartime experiences, and doesn’t entirely fit the Le Carré-esque spy story of which it’s supposed to be part (‘Squire returned to his own country in a curious mental state. What he could confess to no one, and what most deeply disturbed him, was that he had perversely enjoyed killing. It satisfied a black greedy thing in his psyche’ [213]) — Vol 2 of the Squires quartet, Forgotten Life, includes a lot of specifically Burmese wartime recollection, fictionalised into its story.
Reading Life in the West as autobiography locates it in Aldiss’s oeuvre. He often fictionalised his life into novels, as with the Horatio Stubbs Saga [The Hand-Reared Boy (1970), A Soldier Erect (1971), A Rude Awakening (1978)] which novelises his wartime experiences, military and sexual. Aldiss also wrote a great deal of straight autobiography, and it is an interesting exercise to triangulate what he reports of his real life with his fictionalised versions. In terms of straight memoir, there is ‘The Glass Forest’ (1986), a lengthy essay originally produced for Gale Research Press’s Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series and reprinted in …And the Lurid Glare of the Comet (1986). There’s also his entertaining memoir of what it means to be a writer, Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith’s: A Writing Life (1990) and The Twinkling of an Eye (1999), which concentrates with sometimes painful attentiveness on Aldiss’s psychic wounds, his failings as a person, his many affairs, his mental health issues — depression, chronic fatigue, mental breakdown.
Much of this he traces back to his parents. His mother, Dot, Aldiss feels, never loved him. Before he was born she suffered a miscarriage, and in the wake of this she fantasied an angelic afterlife for this ‘perfect’ baby girl that never lived. When Brian came along she would often denigrate and criticise him, comparing him negatively to the perfect, dead child. When pregnant with Brian she had, she insists on telling him, prayed for a baby girl, and now that he is, disappointingly, here and masculine she makes him pray with her for the same thing. When Brian’s little sister is eventually born, his mother becomes convinced that he will infect the baby with whooping cough, and so sends him away, to Peterborough and, when he is old enough, to boarding school, where he is lonely and miserable. Young Aldiss convinces himself that his mother has banished him as unlovable and unwanted, and hardens his heart against her. As an adult he is repeatedly unfaithful to his wife. When his own daughter is born he himself leaves home, replicating the original traumatic separation. The Twinkling of an Eye suggests that he eventually resolved the profound hurt of this in later life, with his second wife (the main character in A Forgottten Life spends most of the novel lamenting that his mother never loved him, but achieves a kind of transcendent revelation in later life that she did — it’s not convincing as fiction, or characterisation, in situ, although the intensity and repetition with which the novel insists upon this redemption clearly cathects something of grave psychological importance to Aldiss himself).
Aldiss’s father, Bill, was careless, unreliable. On one occasion he punished young Brian for some minor infraction by holding him, upside down, out of a second-floor window and threatening to drop him. Afterwards both parents laughingly recall this incident, and young Brian laughs along, nervously and agonised inside. He withdrew into the world of books. Here he recalls a fight with his second wife Margaret, many years later:
Margaret and I had a falling out about something or other. Feeling hopeless, I turned my back and was going to leave. She said … ‘Don’t turn away from me.’ Don’t turn away! I did not recall anyone ever saying that to me before. I turned back to her and took her in my arms. Margaret’s words showed me how I had learnt to behave. Always, the sense of being unwanted…. A harsh word and I was off. What Margaret said showed me how Bill and Dot had never called me back. Bill would have speeded me on my way with a parting jibe. I would have retreated to my room, to solitude and a book. [The Twinkling of an Eye, 352]
The final section of The Twinkling of an Eye records a catastrophic breakdown: Aldiss’s continuing marital infidelities bring on a domestic crisis, and ‘there followed mental breakdown, succeeded by illness’, diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but actually a climacteric depression. With the help of a psychiatrist called Mrs. Green, he works through to ‘a cohesive, sometimes diffuse tale’ about his own life, in which he accepts that he mother did love him, and that his life adds up to a coherent, worthwhile whole.
To read Life in the West alongside this is to be struck by the shifts and psychic relocations the novel undertakes. Squires’s mother hardly figures, and is mentioned as only kindly; but Theresa, his wife, is hostile and angry and rejecting. Squires’s father is mentioned in passing as a suave, gentlemanly, popular figure, prone to alcoholism but otherwise kindly. But his strange, violent death, his throat ripped out by his own dogs, seems to fictionalise a rather different traumatic event from Aldiss’s own youth, to do with his own ‘beloved pet cat, Tiny’:
My arrival startles the cat. It decides to make a run for it. Leaping from the tree, it has gone only a few feet before the dogs are on it, baying with fury. Next moment — in the words of Handel’s Messiah, ‘Behold, I show you a mystery — we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump.’ The cat is changed in the twinkling of an eye. It becomes meat. It becomes an incoherent red mess, stretching, stretching, as the two dogs rush past me, each fastening on to a strand of flesh, running off growling in parallel. [The Twinkling of an Eye, 76]
Horrible! ‘For many months,’ Aldiss says, ‘this terrifying image, and the guilt attendant on it, dominated not only my waking hours.’ It is, he says, ‘the secret sorrow at the heart of things’ in his life. Dogs are everywhere, he says, before connecting the canine and the parental (‘Bill and Dot, in their carefree days before children overtake them, keep Airedales. They breed them and at one time have fourteen … Just beyond my sandpit stands a shed, later to be a tool shed, in which Dot boils up sheep’s heads and oats with which to feed the dogs.’)
In a 1994 article [‘Remembrance of Lives Past’ Science Fiction Studies 21:2 (1994), 129–133] Aldiss says ‘my novels form a parabola above the straight line of my lived life’:
After an early comedy of English society, they take off immediately into space, to planets or futures far away, though their subjects mainly concern evolution and origins, the — as it were — hidden formats of our days. In the seventies, the novels return to Earth briefly to reminisce about a receding past, World War II. Then they are off again, even further, to a planet called Helliconia, a thousand light years away. The dramas enacted on Helliconia reconstruct dramas of power and powerlessness such as we witness every day on Earth, acted out through personae as vivid as I could make them. Whatever Helliconia did for my readers, it did much for me in resolving an inner struggle, in particular my religious concerns; this is accounted for by the metaphysics of the thing. I have always believed that sf was greater than its merely Gernsbackian aspect, though in truth — by which is meant practice — it cannot always live up to its Stapledonian aspirations The parabola of writing then brought me back to Earth: not entirely unexpectedly.
Preceding the Helliconias of the early-to-mid eighties is a somewhat indigestible novel, Life in the West, which considers a global state of play from the viewpoint of a rather obnoxious character, Sir Thomas Squire. Life in the West convinced me I was able to incorporate a novel of ideas (such as British critics, unlike American ones, mainly shun) with a novel of character, and that I should be less timid. With such a conviction in mind, I embarked on the Helliconias; which accounts for the way those three novels designedly differ in construction, one from another.
‘Somewhat obnoxious’ is Aldiss’s unforgiving self-characterisation (and Squire is not ‘Sir Thomas’ until later in the quartet: in Life in the West he is just plain Thomas — although elderly Aldiss was OBE). I agree with him about the superiority of the Stapledonian to the Gernsbackian mode in SF, actually; although I’m not sure he achieves that in this novel.
In some ways, Life in the West has dated markedly. The big climate danger is thought to be global cooling: ‘“The Pope sends a message to the peoples of Poland.” Squires ran a finger further down the page. “Scientists forecast 20,000 cool years ahead. The glaciers retreated to their present positions about 1 1,000 years ago, but now the cooling is beginning again. During the next 20,000 years, we can expect that considerable depths of ice will build up over the Northern Hemisphere. They could reach as far south as Milan. The cause is irregularities in the Earth’s orbit.”’ [12] (‘It means the end of England,’ says D’Exiteuil, and Squires replies, coolly: ‘yes, and France. Not a political collapse but a geophysical one’). Politics is the titular West versus the East, and the novel has much to say about Marxism.
There’s a deal of sexism, and objectification of women, not only from Squires — though lots from him (‘he stood and watched her slender buttocks moving under her dress’ [268]). The sex is rather awkwardly described: ‘He slid into her and they lay side by side, scarcely moving, mouths together, tongues linked’ [71] — tongues linked? Wait: how? ‘He grasped her teasingly by one labium’ [175]. Did he, by George. ‘She opened her mouth, revealing her beautiful lower teeth, her tongue bedded in its clear juices’ [189] Ugh!
One of the book’s ideas is that men engage sexually not with actual human beings but with ‘symbols’: so it is that Laura, who appears in Frankenstein Among the Arts and accompanies Squires around the world filming, and with whom he is having an affair (‘Laura … drape something over this lascivious little body and let’s see how life is progressing down below’) is called ‘the Sex Symbol’. Her role in Frankenstein Among the Arts is to frolic in the surf wearing a tiny bikini, whilst beside her Squires speaks to camera about how sex is the same thing as advertising:
“Advertising in various media frequently makes use of the sea and, of course, of sex symbols such as this young lady by my side. If I mentioned her name, she would become a character, not a symbol; such is the power of names. Her skin is really white, not brown, but she has applied suntan oil to satisfy tradition. The image of brown girl in blue water has proved strongly evocative ever since sea-bathing became fashionable last century. You may believe that such images demean women. I don’t. We are all symbols to each other as well as real people. The experience of the imagination gives life savour.”
Laura knows the affair is going nowhere (“You don’t love me, Tom. You only fancied me because I was billed as the Sex Symbol in your Instant Culture series. You only love me as a symbol — and don’t start telling me that we all respond to each other as symbols, because I hate that line of chat” [177]) and so it proves. Meanwhile, at the Sicilian conference, people lecture, people chat, the significance of digital watches, the semiotics of pinball (‘the pinball table … a cult of functionality. Its object is to transfix with emotion a person who will then surrender money for no reward at all. Thus the pin-table makes an epitome of capitalist economy in its late stage’ [152]) and pop music (‘he recognized the music at once. The Tom Robinson Band playing “Long Hot Summer”’ [87]). D’Exiteuil praises Squires’ young son: ‘“He was with you last time we met in London, if you recall. He impressed me with his knowledge of the music of the Genesis pop group.” “I saw him a few days before Christmas” Squires replies. “This evening, he is seeing the old year out with Fred Cholera and the Pustules. They’re a bit more punk than Genesis.” [254] Fred Cholera and the Pustules. Hmm.
The novel defends science fiction. Squires doesn’t mention Star Wars (1977), but he does speak to the huge popularity of SF that came with that movie.
‘Maybe the secret of all this popularity is that SF puts human character pretty firmly in place. A chap with a name and a lowest common multiple of human characteristics — he may not even have a sex life, poor chap — is set against the cosmos, or against a whole array of inimical technological creations like robots, for example, or against paranoid infrastructures, like multinational companies. Conflict has become more than character — because that’s how many people experience life in these days. I guess the population of the world is about three times what it was when Thomas Mann or Thomas Hardy started writing. There had to be a change and SF expresses the change. SF is the change.’ [202]
On religion and evolution:
“However, the point I was trying to make,” [said Squires] “goes beyond politics, to forces moving through our evolutionary lives, if I may use that phrase. Evolution still shapes us. Compare Islam and Christianity with the conceptually primitive Aztec religion, where mass-salvation could be achieved by mass-sacrifice. Souls were interchangeable. The Old Testament is a drama of man becoming aware that souls are no longer interchangeable.”
[Adjini] smiled. “You speak of the soul, whatever that may be. Yet you are not a religious man?”
“We are all religious. In our day, the Left has all the dialectic, the Right none. Yet lying to hand is the supreme argument that souls are not interchangeable. It is perhaps too universal a truth for the Right to use, too true a truth to fall to the service of any party. Nevertheless it is the vital factor through which the present world struggles towards the future, whether capitalist or communist, Caucasian, Negroid, or Mongoloid. It’s our one hope, because undeniable.” [67]
As per the title, one of the main talking points in the novel is West versus East which, in 1978-terms, means the capitalist west versus the Soviet Union. In one of the funnier chapters, the two Soviet scientists give a lecture on the necessity of a kind of Gurdjieffian optimism blended with dialectical materialism, but the young woman hired to provide simultaneous translation to the audience can’t quite wrangle their Russian, and generates a garbled mess.
“We must look ahead concisely, and without being merciful. It’s enough to know that many things will not be, where for instance people are exploited with bare bread. They stand in rows now. We can’t decide. We have decided … Nor should we be very overturned. If experiments of this kind or type, I should say, confirm to literature, if we will have experiments made purely for the sakes of experiments, then we will have no result. There has to be inspiration to confirm, an example being the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, who has a remarkable development which can be seen. It touches men and women alike, not always from behind. [112]
At dinner that evening, various characters debating the future of West versus East: ‘The possibility of a war with the United States is now really excluded. The West will anyhow fall of itself, as did Byzantium, in effect. China is the great enemy for the Soviets.’ A delegate called Morabito predicts that, under Brezhnev will usher in a new Stalinism, the USSR redefining itself in terms of its radical anti-Semitism: ‘that is the new religion that will fill the empty shell of communism — a new anti-Semitism! Anti-Semitism was official policy under the Czars, and soon the calendar will go back and again … In the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, “AntiZionism” was one excuse. Now more evil propaganda is said in the Soviets against the Jews than ever before. Hitler was only an actor, a — what’s the English word? — a strolling player in hatred against the Jewish people; soon you will see the performance lived.”’ [122]. Aldiss was wrong in terms of the durability of the USSR, and of the reorienting of the geopolitical axis along USSR/China lines , though I wonder about the prescience of this prediction of a resurgence of the anti-Semitic impulse.
You can tell that Aldiss was beginning to plan out the giant Helliconia SF trilogy. The novel keeps coming back to the topic. This is the gist of Herr Professor Fittich, a German delegate:
So Ermalpa is a good place in which to hold this first serious critical enquiry into the aspects of the popular culture of our time. My subject is science fiction literature, or fantascienza, the excellent Italian word, or Utopische Romane, the less effective and in consequence now obsolete German phrase. Science fiction — or SF — is a melting-pot much like Ermalpa. It also contains conflicting cultures. It looks to the future and to the past and, by implication, most searchingly to the present. Many disciplines make their contribution, such as science, of course, notably astronomy and cosmology and the physical sciences, but also any other science you care to name, genetics, biology, down to soft sciences such as sociology and anthropology. Also such more general themes as religion, mythology, apocalypse, catastrophe, Utopia, perfectionism, literature, adventure, and sheer crazy speculation. [193]
Late in the novel Squires sees an actual UFO, flying through the Sicilian skies. There’s some chat about this, and Aldiss annoyingly repeatedly refers to the object as “a You-Foe”, but this story element doesn’t really go anywhere — as if the impulse to transfer the novel Aldiss is writing from mimetic to sciencefictional representation is asserting itself, but not very forcefully. The novel ends with Squires returning to London — he is staying in a flat in Paddington during a trial separation from his wife — and meeting his old TV producer for drinks. This latter, one Grahame Ash, is heading out to Australia. There’s nothing for the UK now, he says:
“After all I’ve done — Frankenstein and all the rest of it! But the oil crisis isn’t going to go away. Inflation isn’t going to go down. I believe, if you ask me, that the Arab world is going to squeeze Europe and the US by the throat. Nothing’s ever going to be the same again. We’re going to go down the drain, till we end up like a lot of little Uruaguays and Paraguays. This country’s had it, that’s my belief, I tell you frankly. We’ll have to team up with the Soviet Bloc in the end, just to keep going. Trading in furs again, before long. Well, I must dash.” He looked at his wristwatch. Summer was closing, and the day; the light thickened in the narrow street. [291
Squires resolves to try and patch things up with his wife. The novel ends in medias res. But then, Aldiss’s life in 1978 was also in medias res. On we go.
