Out of orbit

Peter Ackroyd

The Eighty -Minute Hour Brian Aldiss (Jonathan Cape £2.25) The Boys Henry De Montherlant translated by Terence Kilmartin (Weidenfeld and ,Nicholson £3.25).

And now we can read beyond our wildest imaginings, as Tristram Shandy meets Moriarty on Alpha Centauri. It is not the merest coincidence that these fictive names should jingle together like a profligate Kyrie, since the universe itself and all which it inherits has become an open Book. Shakespeare's undying string of syllables within Love's Labour's Lost, "My face is but a moon, and clouded too," being but a prelude to the random exhange of life-systems within the fun-loving spheres.

The Eighty-Minute Hour 4s Aldiss's Science's Sensations Satirised, a perverse and reversible logomachia. Life, which would mean more under any other name, feeds

precariously off the rapidly shifting surfaces of an hallucogenic Earth. Every possible doom has worked its miracle of transformation, and the planet has become a raddled honeycomb of times and tides. Until we grow our sixth and seventh senses, the ultimate pollution must be that of the time continuum — that well-known invention of the realistic novelist.

And within Aldiss's "electronic zoomatigina of confusion," time cracks up and displays all the symptoms of dementia praecox. Happy military pasts mingle with the fris

sons of future shock; Attica Saigon Smix is vacationing on the floor of Space.(Yes, `Space had a floor. It stretched below the hurtling sunship as the ship's transverters dragged the vessel from micro-space to the ordinary dimensions of the X-World") where there is world enough and time to stick a million pins in the head of one angel; meanwhile Monty Zoomer and Devlin Carnate are worried about something; unknown to any of them, Dagenfort is combing the concentration planet, Mars, for the evil genius Auden Chaplain; in another age altogether Glamis Fevertree is descending on a lovely new

planet to be known as Glamis, but Attica Saigon Smix interrupts her reveries. Now read backwards. A veritable persiflage of brilliances.

I am sorry if I am confusing. In a polyfaceted multiverse, my inky oldspeak is a frozen messenger of the new good news. The Eighty-Minute Hour is the opera bouffe of the new language, the new Eden from which

unhappy silence has been expelled. It is con

tinually surprising with its kollidoscrape of sounds and images, as the movie-go-round

goes on for ever and a day. And there are some happy touches: the boardroom of the World Exective Council, the leathery postlude to the Big Bang, "on the walls of which hung among other treasures the only Tiepolo etching to have survived the war. It depicted the flight into Egypt, and was reputed to be more valuable than Egypt itself." Next to it hangs, as the apotheosis of a future hero, an oil painting of Sir Noel Coward. A new design for living.

And then, safe and sound in our timemachine, we can return to a land fit for heroes.

The Boys creates a time and a place where boys Will be boys or at least the next best thing. De Montherlant's miniature world is `The Park,' a Catholic school where only the innocent can be truly corrupt. The pupils there are mature beyond their years, which can only be put down to the virtues of a French education. Rousseau has a lot to answer for.

It is here that "the Protectorate" cast their spell, in the Spartan mould. A number of passionate attachments are formed between

boys of roughly the same sex, an, :cageist is not dissimilar to that of an airing cupboard. I, too, went to a Catholic school but we had less dirty linen to wash in private.

Alban loves Serge. True. It is puppy love, washed by tiny tears and the squeak of noble sentiments. The young take their passions far more seriously than the less mature ot us, and like a true cynic De Montherlant brings them to life. Alban learns the pangs of requited love while Serge finds precious relief in coming anti most too sad to be interesting. In bass relief we have Mme de Bricoule, Alban's mother and better half, who schemes for her son's hand with a variety of disguises. But of all -the ostensible adults, none is more fearsome than the sepulchral Father De Pradts, a priest Without faith, a paedophile amongst pederasts. There is nothing more dangerous than a clever mind with the emotions of a child: "Although he was an unbeliever, and regarded all believers as simpletons, Father De Pradts had such a lofty idea of the ecclesiastical state that he was shocked by a priest who seemed to him to be wanting in religious fervour." And when these doomed innocents fall upon each other, the result can only be a passion as blind as it is misplaced.

It is this blindness which De Montherlant conveys in an ironic and exact prose. I was continually reminded of Cornelian tragedy (a buffoon's version of farce), where heroes sacrifice everything for glotre, and find themselves more ridiculous than ever. But De Montherlant stands even further back than Corneille, and creates a narrative which is closer to an epic in aspic than anything in the dramatic mould:

What dire offence from am'rous causes springs What mighty contests rise from trivial things. I sing .

There is a pervasive nihilism around the narrative, through which all of our customary virtues and vices are raised to the level of style. Like all cynics, De Montherlant can analyse with refined feeling_ the motives and the behaviour of the general world.

Only a sceptic is fascinated by other people's passions. And it is only within this self-possessed and intricate prose that the mysterious relations of life begin to emerge — the more exact a prose becomes, the more it can reveal of the more profound emotions of life. Mr Kilmartin's translation evokes all of this with a certain sympathy and with an English that manages both the blandness and the irony of the French without losing its Anglo-Saxon gusto.