Ryan's Reviews: The Alteration, by Kingsley Amis

[AndyC]

Discuss @RyanF 's latest review here

 

[Uhura's Mazda]

I read this a few months ago and just came away with the slightly soiled feeling of having spent several hours in the company of a quasi-incel who has an extremely unhealthy attitude towards sex. It's not even that he's writing from the viewpoints of teenagers and sexually repressed people, it's just a constant screed. I ended up siding with the pro-castration characters.

However, I will say that the opening sequence in the cathedral is a brilliant piece of AH exposition, in that you can almost get through the whole scene without clocking that it's AH if you're only skimming it, but if you pay attention and you know your art history, you can piece together quite a lot of the worldbuilding. I wasn't a fan of the shoehorned Dick reference, it felt a bit too look-at-me and didn't quite make sense - however, the more subtle references generally work.

 

[George Kearton]

Years since I read this - but the excellence of this review persuades me to search it out and re-read.

 

[Charles EP M.]

Chief amongst them is Pope John XXIV, a very thinly-veiled portrayal of Harold Wilson.

You think in-universe, there's a book joking what if the old Pope was secretly working for the Caliphate?

 

[OwenM]

You think in-universe, there's a book joking what if the old Pope was secretly working for the Caliphate?

Frankly it'd be more logical ITTL, though they'd have to publish it secretly, obviously.

 

[Arthur_Phuxache]

This was probably the third AH novel I read, after The Man In The High Castle and SS-GB, I can't remember much about it, and this review brought a load of bad memories back.

Keith Roberts' Pavane was a more interesting take on this point of diversion, IMO

 

[Charles EP M.]

Pavane's really good, though the bit at the end of "ah but Our World might be worse cos NUKES" is quite funny many decades later when nothing's blown up (yet)

 

[Arthur_Phuxache]

Yeah, that coda was a bit superfluous, but it was still only written after two decades of the nuclear age.

 

[MAC161]

Just got done re-reading this book (after a long time of letting it sit on the shelf, in keeping with what the review seems to recommend ), and one element that still baffles me to a certain degree is the way the Pope ("a thinly-disguised Harold Wilson", or "Machiavellian Yorkshireman") is portrayed. I understand that Amis may have wanted to caricature Wilson and other 1970s British political figures (esp. the Left/liberal ones, given his tilt to the Right), but I got the sense it was tapping into some larger, popular perception of or animosity towards Wilson that was perhaps common then, and maybe still is today? I know about the conspiracies surrounding him, yet it felt like there was something else behind this portrayal. Anybody have any thoughts?