Book Review: The Alteration

Kingsley Amis
1976
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT

The Alteration is a novel of alternate history that makes us think in new ways—as the best speculative fiction does—about our own real-world society. Its subject matter is extremely personal and emotionally intense, which really helps to drive home Amis’s message about the true violence of tyranny and oppression. It can be, on occasion, wryly funny. But the plot takes such unrelentingly cruel and ironic twists that I would find it hard to say that the book is actually enjoyable to read.

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The novel is set in 1976, in an England where the Protestant Reformation never happened. Martin Luther, rather than being a heretic and a rebel, actually served as a pope himself. Since there was no split with the Catholic mother church, the entire English empire—which includes New England and Canada—is ruled by a king who answers directly to the Roman pope.

And the Catholic Church, in the person of the pope, rules with an iron hand. A rigidly hierarchical societal structure keeps everybody in line. High-status men are infallible and unquestionable; low-status men have next to no power, and women have even less. Science is prohibited by the severely conservative church, so people have no electricity, no advanced forms of communication, and only the barest approximation of motorized vehicles. And, to rub salt in everybody’s wounds, novels of science fiction—which Amis calls “time romances”—are banned as a form of entertainment.

Growing up in this world is Hubert Anvil, a ten-year old clerk in a primary seminary school near London. Hubert has the misfortune of having most beautiful singing voice anyone in the Catholic world has ever heard. Visitors come from all over the globe to hear him. And Rome is very interested in him as an exploitable resource.

So the abbot at Hubert’s school, seeing a way to weasel his way into favor with the pope, decides the boy should be castrated, so his voice won’t change and he can be farmed out to sing as long as possible.

The law requires the abbot to ask the permission of Hubert’s father for this to happen. Mr. Anvil is a little torn at first, having a shadow of a feeling that this might be somewhat bad for Hubert, but is won over by the idea that it will prove his faith absolutely to the church hierarchy.

Hubert’s feelings are, of course, irrelevant. And so are those of his mother, who objects strenuously to Hubert’s castration, and campaigns violently against it to her husband, but has no power whatsoever to prevent it. Hubert’s older brother also doesn’t like it, but doesn’t know how to help him.

The only person who really can and does step up to help Hubert is his family priest, who surprises everyone by publicly objecting to the idea, in courageous direct opposition to his superiors. (His squeamishness about it is probably largely due to the fact that he is perhaps a little more in touch with the taste of the carnal than a priest ought to be.) The priest tries to block the permission for the procedure, but is eventually brutally squashed (somewhat literally) by thuggish agents of the church.

Hubert himself is terribly confused. He has no real sense of what he’d be giving up. He is torn between the passionate objections of his beloved mother, brother, and priest on the one side, and, on the other side, the dictates of the church that he has been brought up to respect and obey above everything else. He has only vague feelings of resistance to the idea, which aren’t nearly strong enough to offset the fear that he will be eternally damned if he refuses.

To make the idea more palatable to Hubert and, perhaps, his father, the two of them get invited to Rome to get a glimpse of the cushy, opulent life he could lead. Unfortunately, this glimpse is provided by two aging eunuchs who aren’t very good examples of the long-term results of the procedure, and one of them even ends up begging Hubert’s father to reconsider; his father is freaked out by the whole scene and they flee back to London.

Meanwhile, while all of this is happening, Hubert gives a recital at the house of the New England ambassador, where he is exposed to a whole new possible attitude about the church and established authority. The New Englanders, living a little too far from the reach of the central church, tend to be a bit more irreverent towards authority and less strict about societal mores. They don’t seem all that bothered by the fact that disobeying the pope might endanger their mortal souls. And the ambassador’s young pre-teen daughter is particularly appealing to Hubert, giving him a bit of a glimmer of understanding about what he’d be losing.

At last, Hubert realizes he really doesn’t want this done to him, and that he has no option but to risk soul-damnation and to run away. When he does, he runs afoul of the criminal underworld, but is also helped by responsible strangers and friends, and he almost makes it to freedom—until an ironic turn of fate makes his whole plan fall apart with an awful thud.

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The Alteration is, on the whole, a well-crafted piece of fiction. Amis’s subject matter is certainly courageous. His characters are colorful and believable. And he creates a plausible 20th-century England that has evolved into its current form without almost any advanced science. Its technology is appropriate to his scenario; he does give the residents of this Europe express trains and some alternatively-powered omnibuses and dirigibles, but most people still primarily rely on horses and oxen for transportation.

Amis’s references to celebrities, both past and present, are sometimes smooth, sometimes jarringly cheeky. Alfieri Maserati serves as the pope’s chief inventor; Sir Francis Crick is a sad, mad, marginalized, heretical scientist; Benedict Arnold was not a traitor, but was instead a war hero, with a major town in New England named for him.

And Amis pays homage to alternate history legend Philip K. Dick with a really cheeky device: his most rebellious characters secretly read a banned alternate-history book called The Man in the High Castle, which is about an England where there was a Protestant Reformation, and where invention is allowed, and there are scientists and electricity and airplanes, and where its New England colony—called “America”—fought a revolution to gain its independence and became the world’s superpower. Needless to say, this book gives the rebels who read it much food for thought about how their own society could be.

This book-within-a-book is actually a relatively minor part of The Alteration, but it unfortunately seems to have obsessed William Gibson, who wrote about it in his introduction to my 2013 paperback version to the exclusion of most of the other, probably more important implications of the novel.

The most important implications of this novel being that tyranny and oppression will inevitably rely on a foundation of violence and cruelty, no matter how the subjects of that tyranny want to deny it, and no matter how the perpetrators of it try to sugarcoat it.

Amis’s characters desperately persist in going about their business as if everything was pleasant and idyllic. They are excruciatingly polite and deferential to each other. They use euphemisms to avoid talking directly about unpleasant or overly-personal topics (to the point where after about five people have tried to explain to Hubert exactly what will happen to him, he still has no idea).

But no matter how much the characters want to believe they live in a peaceful, painless society, the truth is that the church’s authority relies on unchecked violence and pain. At any moment, the men in control can strip away their subjects’ lives, liberty, and sensitive body parts. And if an individual resists, they are not just risking their body or their life; they are risking the damnation of their eternal soul.

The distressing truth of this novel is that Hubert never had a chance. I read in continual hope that he would find freedom. But the seeming inevitability of his fate—forced on him in the end, in spite of all his efforts, almost as if by God—casts a depressing, hopeless shadow over the whole book. And maybe that is Amis’s point, and his warning: in a tyrannical state, self-determination is impossible, and hope is pointless.