The Alteration

Kingsley Amis

1976 • 256 pages

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Average rating3.8

In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976 but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless voice. In the audience is a select group of experts whose job is to determine whether that faultless voice should be preserved by performing a certain operation. Art, after all, is worth any sacrifice. How Hubert realizes what lies in store for him and how he deals with the whirlpool of piety, menace, terror, and passion that he soon finds himself in are the subject of a classic piece of counterfactual fiction equal to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. The Alteration won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel in 1976.

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Zed

Very good. Very clever use of historical figures and cultural references. Those historical and cultural nods do make it a very cynical book. This novel is an attack on organised religion, in this case the Roman Catholic Church. Science is frowned upon and even suppressed in some cases. Even the enlightened practise apartheid and are ethnocentric.

I have been thinking about this book and Pavane by Keith Roberts. Amiss gives a nod to Pavane in this book as one of the many cultural references.
The similarities is that we have a catholic theocracy ruling England. Amis book covers the treatment of one specific individual by the ruling class. It is a very good tale and has one thinking about authoritarianism as a subject.
Pavane on the other hand has 6 chapters with each covering various individuals from all classes. Each chapter is vaguely interlinked so that made me feel that Roberts was able to get to the core of the individuals and how they used their circumstances within their class to their advantage, how they rebelled, how they lived, how they died. I prefer Pavane. It has a humanity about the characters that I found compelling, I had a sympathy for their circumstances. The Alteration did not quite get to that depth of characterisation.

My review of Pavane.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1616637279?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1

May 11, 2017