Greybeard
By Brian Aldiss
I was between books, picking new ones up wondering what to to go for, read the first few paragraphs of this and didn't want to stop. I liked the prose and seemed to be in just the right mood.
Greybeard is the story of people thrown together by circumstances and travelling down a river to the sea. Unfortunately, the "circumstances" are the end of the world, or at least the end of the human component to the world. A few decades ago, an "accident" has rendered humanity and some animals sterile : children have vanished and people are getting old. With the general collapse, nature is now rapidly reclaiming the world and what people survive exist in small isolated pockets, aging and some reverting to an existence informed by rumour, myth and fable. Forests reassert themselves and the nights are dark.
Greybeard is a melancholic story told in a beautifully lyrical style. Aldiss has a way with words in a sometimes spartan way. Great descriptions of the new natural world taking shape as Man diminishes; mist, water, oak and badger come into focus now. The characters, especially Algernon Timberlane ("Greybeard") and his wife Martha, come to life in a special way I think and their love is beautifully described. Martha has a great wit.
I hesitate to call the novel "gentle", it is a story of the end of the world after all and there is certainly some violence depicted. But this is not dwelt upon and no brutality. There is always a background possibility of danger of course. I've seen it described as "pastoral", and I think this fits and what makes the book so good. I've read three great novels from Aldiss now: Non-Stop, Hothouse and now this. I think Greybeard might be my favourite.
I am also reading Billion Year Spree by Brian Aldiss. This is his history of Science Fiction, first published in 1973 (the edition I have) and updated in 1986 (as "Trillion Year Spree"). Aldiss was also a very good reviewer, historian of literature and literary thinker. This history book covers Mary Shelley, Poe, to Wells and all the way up to the New Worlds era. Quite opinionated of course, and perhaps quite a few you might disagree with, but always interesting.
There is also another thing I started to notice about Aldiss' writing: his use of very unusual words sometimes. I have a fair vocabulary but do sometimes come across a word I've not seen before (I noticed this with a "literary" writer like A.S. Byatt or Iris Murdoch) but I've seen it a few times now with Aldiss. In Greybeard for instance, examples include: metoposcopy, tenebrific, tatterdemalion. Looking them up: divination through lines on a forehead, dark and gloomy (obviously from "tenebrae": shadows, darkness) and ragged or disreputable. I could infer tenebrific and tatterdemalion I think. Unusual words though.