KINGSLEY AMIS (1922–1995) was a popular and prolific British novelist, poet, and critic, widely regarded as one of the greatest satirical writers of the twentieth century. Born in suburban South London, the only child of a clerk in the office of the mustard-maker Colman’s, he went to the City of London School on the Thames before winning an English scholarship to St. John’s College, Oxford, where he began a lifelong friendship with fellow student Philip Larkin. Following service in the British Army’s Royal Corps of Signals during World War II, he completed his degree and joined the faculty at the University College of Swansea in Wales. Lucky Jim, his first novel, appeared in 1954 to great acclaim and won a Somerset Maugham Award. Amis spent a year as a visiting fellow in the creative writing department of Princeton University and in 1961 became a fellow at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, but resigned the position two years later, lamenting the incompatibility of writing and teaching (“I found myself fit for nothing much more exacting than playing the gramophone after three supervisions a day”). Ultimately he published twenty-four novels, including science fiction and a James Bond sequel; more than a dozen collections of poetry, short stories, and literary criticism; restaurant reviews and three books about drinking; political pamphlets and a memoir; and more. Amis received the Booker Prize for his novel The Old Devils in 1986 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He had three children, among them the novelist Martin Amis, with his first wife, Hilary Anne Bardwell, from whom he was divorced in 1965. After his second, eighteen-year marriage to the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard ended in 1983, he lived in a London house with his first wife and her third husband.
WILLIAM GIBSON is the author of many novels, including Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition. His collected essays and articles have been published under the title Distrust That Particular Flavor.
OTHER BOOKS BY KINGSLEY AMIS
PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS
The Green Man
Introduction by Michael Dirda
Lucky Jim
Introduction by Keith Gessen
The Old Devils
Introduction by John Banville
THE ALTERATION
KINGSLEY AMIS
Introduction by
WILLIAM GIBSON
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1976 by Kingsley Amis
Introduction copyright © 2013 by William Gibson
All rights reserved.
First published in Great Britain in 1976 by Jonathan Cape
Cover image: Eric Hanson
Cover design: Katy Homans
The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:
Amis, Kingsley.
The alteration / by Kingsley Amis ; introduction by William Gibson.
pages cm — (New York Review Books classics)
ISBN 978-1-59017-617-7 (pbk.)
1. Choirboys—Fiction. 2. England—Fiction. 3. Satire. I. Title.
PR6001.M6A48 2013
813’.6—dc23
2012045909
eISBN 978-1-59017-637-5
v1.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
Contents
Biographical Notes
Title page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
THE ALTERATION
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Introduction
When I read, last year, that the Chinese government had banned film and television productions involving the theme of time travel, I immediately knew why. Like Kingsley Amis, they appreciate the subversive potential of a certain sort of imagining: the counterfactual, which is quite beyond state control.
Fiction set in imaginary, counterfactual, parallel worlds, worlds in which history has taken a broadly different course, are quite demanding, both for author and reader. If nothing else, they require a second level of literacy: some familiarity with actual history (this alone would be enough to make them unpopular with totalitarian regimes). That requirement, I suspect, today sadly accounts in part for The Alteration’s relative obscurity among Amis’s works.
A compact, ferociously clever, disturbing, sometimes very touching novel, often hilarious, never less than fully adult, it has remained one of its author’s less familiar titles. Nor is it particularly well known to readers of science fiction, many of whom still shy away from the work of mainstream “literary” authors, of whom Amis was certainly one. This has been a pity, both because The Alteration is one of the finest, most rigorously executed of all parallel-world novels and because Amis was himself both a gifted and very appreciative anthologist of short science fiction, and arguably one of its first modern critics.
He constructs, in The Alteration, deliciously, meticulously, an England, a 1976, in which the pope presides (from Rome, of course) over a tremendously stable, monolithic, virtually global Catholic theocracy, as free of democracy as it is of electricity. Neo-Victorian, quasi-medieval, only very reluctantly modern, it is a world in which “science” is literally a dirty word, the papacy having proven itself adroit at disconnecting the manifold change-drivers that have produced our own world today. It would not (though in 1976 Amis had no way to know this) be a world in which climate change would be a factor, nor one in which wholesale use of antibiotics has lead to a rise in drug-resistant organisms. Most scientific discovery simply hasn’t happened, or if it has, it’s been brutally suppressed. It’s a terrifyingly serene totalitarian nightmare, its massive stasis threatened only, we eventually discover, by the very extent of its own success.
I will say as little as I can of the novel’s characters, or plot, and indeed I would hope that you’ve come to the text knowing nothing about any of that, the keenest pleasures of parallel-world stories being peculiarly susceptible to “spoilers.” I do hope, though, that you come to it with some basic knowledge of history. If you’re uncertain what the Reformation was, or of Martin Luther’s role in it, I commend you, at the very least, to Google and Wikipedia. You may need to do a bit of reading before you can fully enjoy The Alteration.
My favorite aspect of this book, as much as I enjoy its exquisite high-resolution world-building, lies in twinned aspects of the literature within it. We glimpse, in the young protagonist’s childhood bedroom, a shelf of thoroughly approved classics, in which we see our own literature reflected, oddly: Lord of the Chalices, The Wind in the Cloisters, a series of novels that combine the adventures of James Bond with those of Father Brown, and a version of Gulliver’s Travels in which the hero is St. Lemuel. Yet the boy’s truest passion, when it comes to fiction, already lies elsewhere, in a clandestine genre known as TR, Time Romance. The most subversive of all TR are not those books imagining potential accomplishments of science, a word not to be uttered in polite company, but the ones comprising a subgenre known as CW, Counterfeit World, which imagine the world as it might be had things happened differently. Had Martin Luther, say, never become Pope Martin.
For the reader familiar with the CW of our world, Amis accomplishes, as it were in the attic of his novel, a sublime hall-of-mirrors effect. In our world, Philip K. Dick wrote The Man in the High Castle, in which the Axis triumphed in World War II. Within Dick’s book there is another, imaginary book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, envisioning a world in which the Allies
won, though that world clearly isn’t ours. In Amis’s counterfeit world, someone called Philip K. Dick has written a novel, The Man in the High Castle, imagining a non-Catholic world. Which isn’t ours. In our world, Keith Roberts wrote Pavane, another exceptionally fine parallel-world novel. In The Alteration, someone called Keith Roberts has also written a novel, but with an interestingly different title. This business of TR and CW strikes me, as it plays so artfully through the book, as likely the best Jorge Luis Borges story Jorge Luis Borges never wrote.
I would recommend The Alteration simply as a study in tyranny, as effective, and terrifying, albeit in its much quieter way, as Orwell’s 1984 (which has become, via the passage of decades, another sort of counterfactual, this being the eventual fate of every imagined future, particularly those given dates). When Amis wrote The Alteration, I suppose, possibilities of emergent totalitarian theocracies must have seemed rather more removed, though we’ve had good reason since, from various sides, to see that as not entirely the case.
And I would also recommend it as a text for feminists, as it depicts the oppression of patriarchy, given full reign by theocracy, as thoroughly as any novel prior to, say, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It is a most admirably foul counterfeit world in that regard, mercilessly and unforgettably so.
Finally, though it embarrasses me to say so, I must recommend it as containing the single finest steampunk set piece I know of: a seven-hour highly luxe train journey between London and Rome, via Sopwith’s magnificent Channel Bridge. Amis accomplishes this with seemingly effortless panache, and in that moment, within the novel, the counterfactual, for all its horror, becomes deeply and gloriously seductive. As can happen in the factual too, as we well know.
P.S. If you enjoy this book as much as I do, you might want to see what Amis managed with a different genre: modern fantasy-horror. That one’s called The Green Man.
—WILLIAM GIBSON
THE ALTERATION
To Joanna and Terry Kilmartin
Chapter One
Hubert Anvil’s voice rose above the sound of the choir and full orchestra, reaching the vertex of the loftiest dome in the Old World and the western doors of the longest nave in Christendom. For this was the Cathedral Basilica of St George at Coverley, the mother church of all England and of the English Empire overseas. That bright May afternoon it was as full as it had ever been in the three centuries since its consecration, and it would scarcely have held a more distinguished assembly at any time: the young King William V himself; the kings of Portugal, of Naples, of Sweden, of Lithuania and a dozen other realms; the Crown Prince of Muscovy and the Dauphin; the brother of the Emperor of Almaigne; the viceroys of India, New Spain and Brazil; the High Christian Delegate of the Sultan-Calif of Turkey; the Vicar-General of the Emperor Patriarch of Candia; the incumbent Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of United England; no fewer than twelve cardinals, together with less preeminent clergy from all over the Catholic world—these and thousands besides had congregated for the laying-to-rest of His Most Devout Majesty, King Stephen III of England and her empire.
He had been a good king, worthy of his distinction in matters of faith and observances, enjoying mutually-respectful relations with both Convocation and the Papal Cure, held in tender affection by the people. A large number of those attending his Requiem Mass would have been moved as much by a sense of personal loss as by simple duty or the desire to assist at a great occasion. Just as many, perhaps, were put in awe by the size and richness of the setting. Apart from Wren’s magnificent dome, the most renowned of the sights to be seen was the vast Turner ceiling in commemoration of the Holy Victory, the fruit of four and a half years’ virtually uninterrupted work; there was nothing like it anywhere. The western window by Gainsborough, beginning to blaze now as the sun first caught it, showed the birth of St Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, at Colchester. Along the south wall ran Blake’s still-brilliant frescoes depicting St Augustine’s progress through England. Holman Hunt’s oil-painting of the martyrdom of St George was less celebrated for its merits than for the tale of the artist’s journey to Palestine in the hope of securing authenticity for his setting; and one of the latest additions, the Ecce Homo mosaic by David Hockney, had attracted downright adverse criticism for its excessively traditionalist, almost archaizing style. But only admiration had ever attended—to take a diverse selection—the William Morris spandrels on the transept arches, the unique chryselephantine pyx, the gift of an archbishop of Zululand, above the high altar, and Epstone’s massive marble Pietà.
To few but the tone-deaf, the music must have been far more immediate than any or all of these objects: Mozart’s Second Requiem (K.878), the crown of his middle age and perhaps of all his choral work. Singers and musicians had just entered upon the Agnus Dei. There was a story about this too, that it had been written out of the composer’s grief at the untimely death of an esteemed and beloved younger contemporary, but its celestial plangency needed no such eking-out. From its home key of D minor, the piece moved through the relative major into the G minor section for solo voice and orchestra. With its long runs and jagged melodic line it made great demands on the singer, but Hubert Anvil was more than equal to them, hitting every note in the middle, moving from top to bottom of the wide tessitura with no loss of tone or power. Throughout the huge congregation all were motionless, and remained so when the section came to a close and the choir was heard again.
Some stayed still because they felt they should rather than from artistic or pious feeling. Two such were the aged representatives of the Holy Office in their black vestments symbolically piped in scarlet: Monsignor Henricus and Monsignor Lavrentius, or to give them the familiar names by which they were known in their native Almaigne and Muscovy, Himmler and Beria. Not far from them, a third man held himself rigid out of a desire not to give the smallest grounds for offence to those many of his neighbours who made no attempt to conceal from him their often hostile curiosity. The Archpresbyter of Arnoldstown was the first holder of his office ever to have crossed the threshold of St George’s and there was some resentment at the admission of a Schismatic eminence—in plainer terms, a surpliced heretic—to today’s ceremony. At his side, Cornelius van den Haag, New Englander Ambassador to the Court of St Giles, had become too far immersed in the music to stir.
For Federicus Mirabilis and Lupigradus Viaventosa, what they were now listening to was a significant part of their entire reason for attendance. Mirabilis’s eyes were open, though they saw nothing; Viaventosa’s were lightly shut, with a tear showing at the corner of each. Both men knew Mozart’s masterpiece by heart and had the skill to remove from consciousness the woodwind decorations, the solemn brass chords, the throb of the kettledrums, the surge of the strings. All that the two heeded was Hubert Anvil’s performance. Neither relaxed or moved until it was complete, until the supremely difficult solo flourish in the coda had been accomplished, until indeed the final bar had been passed and, at the end of some seconds of total silence, a great rustle and clearing of throats filled the nave. Then Mirabilis turned and looked questioningly at his companion. After wiping away his tears, Viaventosa nodded his head slightly several times.
Outside the basilica, thousands of the people waited in the extensive paved square formed by its western face, the archiepiscopal palace opposite and, to the north and south, the Chapter-House and the offices and residences of the Archdeacon, the Dean, the Vicar-Choral and other functionaries. These thousands had come not only from Coverley itself, but from as far away as London or even cities of the northern shires, most of them by waggon, those who could afford it by railtrack or express-omnibus. They were the early arrivals, and they waited not only for a sight of royal, ecclesiastical and noble magnificence, but also for the Archbishop’s benediction, which those other thousands, now lining the way to Headington Palace, must to their spiritual hardship go without.
The sun shone down, illuminating to advantage the rather severe facciata of the Chapter-House,
pleasantly warming the multitude, which would, however, have assembled just the same in a snowstorm. On a different sort of grand occasion—a royal wedding, an anniversary of the Holy Victory—there would have been noise and bustle and trafficking, fiddlers, jugglers, acrobats, comedians, balladiers, vendors of hot patties and ginger beer, sharpers and pickpockets too. If there were any such here today, they were not plying their trade, but stood quietly alongside the worthy men who worked in the fields, forests and mines, in the provision of food, drink, clothing or furniture, in domestic service and in that profusion and variety of humbler lay offices required by the Church. When, as expected, Great Dick began to toll, indicating that King Stephen now lay at rest among his forefathers in the cathedral vaults, a groan of grief ran through the crowd and subsided. Again they settled down to wait, until the tall bronze doors of the basilica slowly opened.
At a dignified pace, the members of the congregation began to emerge and to take up their preordained places along the broad marble steps. Above them, the sculptured figures of Vanbrugh’s tympanum, a boldly inventive representation of St George and the Dragon, caught the sunlight here and there, and above everything soared the twin Brunel spires, each of them over -topping by several feet that of Ulm Cathedral in Almaigne. The Archbishop ascended his tribunal popular, and it would be some minutes yet before all were in position to receive his blessing. His snow-white vicuna pallium, and beneath it the chasuble of black velvet adorned with gold, were an emblem of the austerity to be seen almost everywhere on this day. The Royal Palatine Guard in their azure and violet, together with the carmine uniforms and capotes of the Papal Cohort, provided the only patches of vivid colour. None could be found among the people, nothing but the dullest tones of moleskin, corduroy or hessian.