Nicholas During's Reviews > The Alteration

Kingsley Amis does sci-fi well. If you're willing to call this sci-fi, which I'm sure many aren't. But whether you want to call it genre or not, Amis gets into the mood with this book and does what sci-fi, or speculative fiction, is meant: imagines a world very different from own. In this one the Reformation never happened. Luther became pope. England stayed Catholic. And the world is therefore a much more backward place. Science is a dirty word and the rituals and power of the Romish Church are omnipresent. Only America has, with its protestant faith and ideological slavery of the natives, advances technologically to a more recognizable present, since this book is set in the present, just a very different one.

So you can tell this is a pretty vicious attack on the Catholic Church. Waged with an intent and cleverness that Amis is very good at. Can you imagine living in the religiously dominant Middle Ages? It would probably suck. And of course the other thing Amis does is have fun playing with history. The Vatican, much of which is built by a Luther as Pope Germanium I, is austere and empty. Mozart lived and wrote to a fine old age while Beethoven was a short lived phenomenon. You have to be pretty knowledgable about English history, and architecture, and music, to catch all the references, but you get the sense of it and, as I said, the fun of this kind of book is the creativity and fun the author has in building an alternate time and place.

One also admires Amis's strength here. Whether its attack of the Catholic Church is too much or not, he deeply believes in the prevalence and awfulness of tyranny, and makes one think about its past, present, and potential future. This is not the average sci-fi book. Though different it is a the world of 1976, not 2076 Mars. Hubert Anvil is too clever to be a real kid. And the plot lines sometimes bumble into each other. But if you like inventive alternate worlds, this is a book you should read.