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Life in the West
Brian Aldiss
The first volume in the acclaimed Squire Quartet., available for the first time on ebook.Thomas C. Squire, popular presenter of television documentaries, one time secret agent, a hedonist whose worldly success and self-confidence overshadow the lives of his family and friends, faces a mid-life crisis which undermines the stability of his ancient house. This brilliant and sometimes violent novel moves from England to Sicily, Singapore and Jugoslavia.Brian says: ‘A complex and argumentative drama built about the axes of Thomas Squire’s attendance at an imaginary contemporary ARTS symposium in Sicily, his extramarital and marital relationships, and his past as a secret agent in Jugoslavia, a land caught between East and West. Includes several humorous portraits of national types.’First published in 1980 and unavailable for some time.
Life in the West
THE SQUIRE QUARTET
Brian Aldiss, OBE, is a fiction and science fiction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. He was born in Norfolk in 1925. After leaving the army, Aldiss worked as a bookseller, which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). His first published science fiction work was the story ‘Criminal Record’, which appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. Since then he has written nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories, many of which are being reissued as part of The Brian Aldiss Collection.
Several of Aldiss’ books have been adapted for the cinema; his story ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’ was adapted and released as the film AI in 2001. Besides his own writing, Brian has edited numerous anthologies of science fiction and fantasy stories, as well as the magazine SF Horizons.
Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society and in 2000 was given the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Aldiss was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2005. He now lives in Oxford, the city in which his bookselling career began in 1947.
Brian Aldiss
Life in the West
Dedication
Life in the West is dedicated to other
Distinguished Persons
Chen, David, Iris, Maysie, and Michael
by no means forgetting Felix, Elena, Derek, and Janet
to show them what one of their number was up to
before we sampled life in the East
and walked the Great Wall together
Contents
Cover (#u6b23d01e-9212-5110-9377-920361a68424)
Life in the West
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Prelude
1 The International Congress
2 Flattery and Higher Foolishness
3 A View from the Beach
4 Conversation with ‘Drina’s’
5 She’s Only a Sex Symbol
6 Putting our Socialist Friends to Rights
7 Land Full of Strange Gods
8 Sublimated Coin Warfare
9 How to Get to Ostrow Lomelsky
10 Slatko
11 ‘The Strong Act as They Have Power to Act’
12 Tribal Customs
13 Illegal Currency Charges
14 An Ideological Decision
Acknowledgments
THE SQUIRE QUARTET
Copyright
About the Publisher
Epigraph
I walked beside a sea aflame,
An animal of land. The fire
Of stars knocked at my earthbound frame:
East of grapples West, man maid, hope Fate;
All oppositions emanate
From constellations of desire.
Burning below hair, flesh, and teeth,
An image of the Bright Ones lies,
A lantern hid in bone. Beneath
That vision, teeth and hair begin
Again; wolf grins to wolfish grin
As smile I in my lover’s eyes.
Too soon that love with false-bright hair
Is dead: the house stands silent. I
Fare forth across the world’s despair,
Its muteness, oratory, and banners,
To seek not truth but modern manners.
The head must win what heart let die.
Introduction
When I began to write the Squire Quartet my intention was to portray something of the world I was living in, from the 1980s onwards. I found most of that world exciting – enticing to experience and to record.
This, the first volume of the Squire Quartet, brisk and chatty, was published on March 6th 1980 – as a loving card from my wife, still tucked into her copy of the book, reminds me. We were living on a quiet North Oxford street and our younger children were seriously into education. We were always moving house, depending on our fortunes.
I had been attending a conference in Palermo – a conference with a strong Communist flavour, not particularly enjoyable. It was over. I was standing on the dockside, looking north over the sea. A story began to build up in my mind: the conference; the players from various countries, where the economic blocs seemed irreconcilable; and at the same time, a man’s – Sir Thomas C. Squire’s – difficulties at home.
Once I returned to our house in Charlbury Road, I launched into the novel. My mother died during that period; a melancholy event recorded when Squire’s mother dies just before Christmas. You have to go on, whatever happens. Maybe the army taught me that. Or maybe I had known it even as a small boy. Anyhow, Squire also has to press on. Trouble in Yugoslavia, where he is almost killed. Separation from Teresa, his wife. More human experience, more meditation. More striving to penetrate the thickets.
The novel opens with Squire in Ermalpa, Sicily, for a conference on the popular arts, dubbed ‘the arts of no refinement’. He claims that the pop art of one generation becomes the classic of the next: ‘Homer was, in his day, the Bronze Age equivalent of the TV soap opera.’ Squire is for the new, insisting we rise up to change.
Later, back at his Norfolk house, Pippet Hall, Squire is filming and being filmed. The traditional pretty girl in a swimsuit is with him. He remarks, ‘We are all symbols to each other as well as real people.’
It is the period of the Cold War – much discussion takes place. Squire and his wife quarrel bitterly.
Squire recalls a note given to him in Ermalpa, in which Vasili Rugorsky, the friendly Russian, proposes they visit Nontreale’s cathedral and that Squire pay the bus fare: ‘our government keeps us poor as saints.’
They get to Nontreale and enter the cathedral. Rugorsky praises the elaborate artwork. He says to the unimpressed Squire, ‘Without God, I can see no meaning in anything.’
‘Do you ever experience the feeling that you have come to a dead halt in your life?’ Rugorsky asks.
So the questioning goes on, the faltering marriage, the symbols, the seasons, life itself …
Brian Aldiss
Oxford, 2012
Prelude
Spring 1977
A period in the history of the West known as the late nineteen-seventies. One of the milder inter-glacial periods, when textbooks describe the North European climate as ‘pleasantly cool and damp’.
Over the European Economic Community, eight o’clock of a windy and rather chill spring evening. Television screens brighten everywhere, in flats, houses, and apartments stretching from Scapa Flow to the Gulf of Otranto. Hundreds of them, thousands, millions, the characteristic burning to ward off the terrors of ancient night. So characteristic that future historians will refer to this cultural epoch as the Rounded Rectangular. The global village enjoys its nightly catharsis of violence or Kultur.
The light brightens. Music, and the sight of a savage tropical landscape. The peaks of mountains covered with rain forest stand out against a fast-moving sky. The forest also appears to move, crawling across the screen as if its trunks were a myriad legs. It sweeps beneath the viewer. A river is revealed, dark-flowing, hemmed with sand.
As the viewpoint sinks, a long-boat is revealed, pulling in to one of the banks of the river. Six tourists climb ashore, gazing up at a towering and broken cliff face. From every cranny of the cliff, trees and creepers grow. At one point, tangled creepers hang down into the water.
The viewpoint moves in to reveal the boatman in close-up. He is a lean and aged Dayak, with a polished brown countenance, a wrinkled forehead, and hollows at cheeks and temples. He rests his hand upon a no less worn wooden post which marks the start of the ascent up the cliff.
Floating down, the viewpoint rests upon the Dayak’s arm and hand.
On his wrist is an LC digital quartz timepiece and calculator. Its case, finished in gold and stainless steel, glints in the sunshine. With its perimeter punctuated by studs, it resembles momentarily, in the dazzle of its reflection, some armoured insect from a much earlier period of Earth’s history. But a slight move of the boatman’s wrist, and the six square ceaseless digits are revealed. They grow larger, writhe into red letters. The red letters come swimming forward to fill the screen, forming the legend:
FRANKENSTEIN AMONG THE ARTS
The party moves from the boat, trudging through the sand with their heads down. They climb the cliff by a winding path from which lizards scurry. Cloud shadow comes and goes. The tourists walk along a raised plank walk through dense primary forest, often having to brush creepers aside. The detached voice of Thomas Squire is heard.
‘We’re in some of the oldest jungle in the world, older than the jungles of the Amazon or the Congo. Successive Ice Ages, which caused so much change elsewhere, had no effect on this luxuriance. Listen to its rich silence – you can hear the murmur of antiquity. Transitory-seeming things like silences and pollen have proved themselves capable of enduring over millions of years.’
As his voice lapses to allow the voice of the jungle to take over, another legend swims into view:
Episode One:
Eternal Ephemera
The party of tourists continues deeper into the forest, emerging suddenly under a ravaged hillside. They pause; they are seen to be of mixed race, two Caucasian, the others Mongoloid; all are dressed similarly, male or female, in comfortable travelling clothes. They walk towards a strangely-shaped cave resembling a whale’s mouth. Stalactites and fallen stone about its rim reinforce this impression and give the appearance of teeth, broken but still functional. One by one, the party moves into the great mouth.
‘We are entering the limestone mountains of a part of Malaysia called the Tinjar National Park. Few tourists from the West ever visit here. These caves are dangerous. Not only do they shelter snakes, bats, and a spiteful variety of centipede, but there are concealed abysses on the cave floors, down which an unsuspecting traveller can drop, sometimes for hundreds of feet. Despite these dangers, when we enter here, we are coming into one of the most ancient homes of mankind.’
From inside the whale’s mouth, the foliage outside appears pale and translucent, like spray off a sea. From a deep darkness into the light, bats begin to pour, more and more of them, flying like leaves in an October wind, ceaselessly.
‘Human beings, homo sapiens, lived in these caves 40,000 years BC, at a time when the last Ice Age had its grip on Europe, and the draughty caves of the Dordogne sheltered our remote forebears. In that long period of time, these bats have not changed in any way, as far as we know, while mankind has changed in so many remarkable ways that we often forget that we have also hardly changed at all.’
The bats continue to pour out into the daylight, thousands upon thousands of them, and still no cease to their numbers. The rustle of their wings follows the viewpoint into the throat of the cave, which is uncertainly illuminated by a floodlight.
‘In terms of centuries, a human life is ephemeral. The things we do, the things we make, our alliances and enmities, are even more ephemeral. These paintings were executed one forgotten day thousands of centuries ago.’
In the uncertain light, faces loom, bodies of men, animals, bright fish, plants, all in mysterious relationships and preserved under a glistening film of limestone. Then the light dies. Something can still be seen in the darkness; it is the liquid crystal display of the boatman’s watch, on which the seconds flit rapidly by.
‘These paintings were not intended to last. Perhaps they were intended to please or function – whatever that function was – just for a day. They are beyond taste. There is an old saying, it is “De gustibus non est disputandum”, meaning, “It’s useless to discuss questions of taste”; yet this series of programmes is designed to discover more about taste, and why and how taste changes.’
Further in the cave, the light reveals pictures of two lizards, curving their bodies round bosses of rock. One lizard is green, one red.
