The Alteration (New York Review Books Classics)
Kingsley Amis
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1590176170
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
Monsters of Men (Chaos Walking, Book 3)
Only You Can Save Mankind (Johnny Maxwell, Book 1)
Scarlet (The Lunar Chronicles, Book 2)
Give you a notion. And yet all this is only a kind of beginning. Something strange, something unique takes place.’ ‘The soul is transformed?’ ‘Who said so?’ ‘I forget. I must have found it in a book.’ ‘It’s meaningless to me. How can what we know nothing of be transformed? No, I speak of the entirely physical. Or the super-physical: a state of bodily cognizance compared with which all other states are—how can I put it?—unsubstantial and heavisome and bloodless. The man and the woman are so.
In going through it. Or...’ Hubert hesitated, but the Prefect still stared. ‘Or it was those minutes going through my mind.’ ‘You tell me it came to you from somewhere else.’ The voice was at its harshest now. ‘No—no, master, it was inside my mind already when I . . . looked.’ ‘Very well. These F naturals here.’ Morley pointed with a stubby finger. ‘And again near the end.’ ‘Oh yes.’ Hubert sang a short phrase. ‘Why did you have your hands in front of you then?’ ‘Did I so? I expect because.
From Rome to attend a requiem mass in England? Why does an elderly chapelmaster make his first visit to our country on the same occasion? And how is it that two such men, even though foremost in their function, gain entry to St George’s among princes and spiritual lords? Because they do the Pope the same service as they do you, my lord.’ ‘Sebastian: you said nothing of this.’ ‘I feared I might have said too much when the two came here to sup, and had to plead melancholia. Oh, I was bitter then.
‘Enough to attach you,’ shouted Redgrave. ‘Upon what inculpation?’ Foot betrayed very slight surprise. ‘It’s an offence to cast a servant of the State or the Church into obloquy and disrepute, and, uttered in public, a tenth part of what we’ve heard would surely fetch an inculpation. But all this was in private.’ ‘But his gross defiance—his refusal to . . .’ ‘Our commission was only to ask questions, not to compel replies.’ ‘But the type outfaces our threat to remove him!’ A silent message.
Trees, and went there as fast as he safely could. ‘So, master runaway,’ said Decuman’s voice. ‘Have a piss before you set off. There’s six hours at least till full light, so wherever you mean to go you needn’t scramble. If a constable questions you, you act like a noodle. ‘The priest . . . send . . . for me,’ and if he asks where, point the way you go. He’ll soon tire of you. Get your food at stalls and pattie-shops, never at an eating-house, however low. Journey by night, except through towns,.