Diminuendo
Nick Totton
A Quiet Life Beryl Bainbridge (Duckworth £3.25) The Alteration Kingsley Amis (Jonathan Cape £3.50)
A Quiet Lile might equally well have been named with another phrase which occurs near the end of the novel: 'A Close Family'. The family concerned—and if the surname is ever mentioned, I missed it—is indeed close: stiflingly, murderously close. Their house is effectively reduced to its kitchen by a combination of poverty (the cost of heating) and the mother's compulsive cleanliness.
No one has anywhere to go; everyone, trying to create their own safe space within t he storm, is competing for Lebensraumwith the rest. And when the repression breaks out too loudly, they turn the radio up to deceive the neighbours.
The son, Alan, has learnt his parents' contradictory lessons well. It is through his eyes that we see events; and his main concern is to save appearances, to keep the lid on, preserving his family's façade and thus his own. In this and in general, Alan's adolescence differs only subtly from many people's: endless Chinese-box discoveries of the adult realities behind the events of his childhood (that his father is an undischarged bankrupt, for instance); the utter frustration of trying to explore sexuality with someone as wholly ignorant as himself; terror of his own dangerous emotions. The differences are only of emphasis, of intensity. They are enough to bring him to the edge of breakdown.
In the unconscious plenum of the family, his younger sister Madge has been elected to a different role. It is as if everyone has donated to her their own portion of aspiration; she has never been fully conditioned to the everyday dishonesties, to unquestioning acceptance of the rules. Alan is quite rightly aware that she can get away with acts of freedom not permitted to him : we see the deliberate vagueness with which their parents manage to avoid confronting her mysterious evening absences. But although they cannot be directly faced, these absences are an event long prepared for within the family, and with deep consequences.
Though at first glance A Quiet Life seems as uneventful as the title suggests, there is tremendous subterranean life. With surgical delicacy and saintly humour, Beryl Bainbridge exposes the web of repression in which this family is caught. It would be impossible here to give an account of the complex power relations among the four protagonists; but in the last analysis, all of them— even 'free' Madge—are victims rather than manipulators. A convincing 'flash-forward' shows the adult Alan and Madge meeting after their mother's death, and finding their memories of adolescence to be irreconcilable. They were lived in a half-light of self-deception from which they can never now emerge. Anything for a quiet life.
This is a subtle, moving, witty book. Its only real fault is that it reaches a dramatic climax, a convulsion of the web under ex treme tension, which seems superfluous Within the logic of the novel. It's the old problem of the ending: the classic pattern of crescendo and brief diminuendo is inappropriate to a lot of contemporary work, but Still devilishly hard to avoid. The rest of the book is perhaps more accurate as an adolescent's perception: many overlapping rhy thms, with unpredictable concentrations and relaxations, the larger pattern of events visible only in hints and glimpses. In its deft and unemphatic way, A Quiet Life is a tragic, comic, study of what has been called 'the psychosocial interior of the family'.
,Ever since Kingsley Amis wrote New Maps of Hell, his bizarre 'study' of science fiction,
lovers of the genre have been afraid that he would one day attempt to write a science fiction novel. The Alteration, its hour come round at last, is that book; and pretty terri ble it is too. In an alternative universe to our own, Prince Arthur's impregnation of Catherine of Aragon and Luther's ascension to the papacy are among the factors that have led to a Catholic-dominated world in 1976: the Pope is supreme ruler of Europe and its empires. Before this backdrop (it never amounts to much more) we watch the Realpolitik manoeuvres that develop around the proposed castration of a tenYear-old boy soprano, Hubert Anvil.
earnestly advise anyone who is stimulated by this outline to eschew Mr Amis and turn to science fiction proper, where he will find many more interesting alternate universes. There is a lot of fun, to be sure, in such manipulations—making Himmler and Beria into cardinals, Jean-Paul Sartre into a Jesuit—but Mr Amis is not adroit (his biases show too savagely); and, of course,
the fun quickly palls unless some further Point is being made. One might suggest that
the creation of a universe is not an act to enter upon lightly. Is Mr Amis's journey really necessary?
There are other criticisms. Hubert Anvil is twice as resourceful and articulate as many grown-ups; but perhaps the author is imitating the mediaeval portrayal of children as dwarf adults? Hubert also carries sexual latency to the extent of apparently having no immediate strong feelings one way or the Other about castration. The other characters are also cardboard, the writing leaden, the Plot trivial—and concluded with a stroke of Coincidence which implies either that God is a Catholic or that Mr Amis is God. Perhaps he, no less than his intending readers, would benefit from study of the alternative universe mentioned as an in-joke in The Alteration: Philip K. Dick's 'The Man in the High Castle'.
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