Brian Aldiss - Life in the West

The first volume of the Squire quartet, brisk and chatty. Published on 6 thMarch 1980—as a loving card from my wife reminds me, still tucked into her copy of the book.

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.

Meanwhile, Tom Squire is in Ermalpa in 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 Pippet Hall, Squire is filming and being filmed. The traditional pretty girl in a swimsuit is with him. She remarks that “We are all symbols to each other as well as real people.”

This is the period of the Cold War. Much discussion takes place. Squire and his wife quarrel bitterly. Over Christmas, Squire’s mother, Patricia Squire, dies.

I had been attending a conference in Palermo, a conference with a strong Communist flavour, and not particularly enjoyable. It was over. I was standing on the dockside, looking north over the sea. This story began to build up in my mind, the conference, the players from various countries, where the economic blocs seemed irreconcilable. And meanwhile, Squire’s difficulties at home where he and his wife were indeed symbols to each other, as the girl in the swimsuit had said.

When I had returned home to that house in Charlbury Road, I launched into the novel. My mother died during that period; that melancholy event is recorded when Tom 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 has to press on. Trouble in Jugoslavia, where he is almost killed. separation from Teresa, his wife. More human experience, more meditation. More striving to penetrate the thickets.

He recalls a note given him in Ermalpa, in which Vasili Rugorsky, the friendly Russian, proposes they visit Nonreale cathedral and Squire pays the bus fare. “Our government keeps us poor as saints.”

They get to Nonreale and enter the cathedral. Rugorsky praises the elaborate artwork. Squire is unimpressed. “Without God, I can see no meaning in anything,” says Rugorsky. He asks, “Do you ever feel that you have come to the end of everything in your life?”

So the questioning goes on, the faltering marriage, the symbols, the seasons, life itself…

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:

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:

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.’