Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
NYRB Classics (2013), Edition: Reprint, Paperback, 256 pages
Description
"In Kingsley Amis's virtuoso foray into alternate 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. After all, any sacrifice is worth it for the perfection of art. 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 to equal 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"--… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member baswood
KIngsley Amis was one of the leading writers of his generation and by the time he published The Alteration in 1976 he had fifteen novels under his belt. In my view he is one of those authors who straddles a line between populism and literature, his first novel Lucky Jim was a comic novel on life
The Alteration has plenty of surprises in store, for a start it could easily fit into the genre of science fiction being an alternate history of the world and could also be seen to be a damming indictment of religion. Amis’s alternate history stems from him imagining that Henry VIII never became king of England and that his older bother Arthur survived to claim the throne and together with his Spanish queen Catherine of Aragon tied the country to the Roman Catholic faith. Britain became a world power wedded to the Papacy and soon became a theocracy. The result was that progress was held back by about 200 years; electricity was considered by the church too dangerous to use, horse and cart was the transport used by the poor, a diesel engine has been invented and express carriages sped along the road system. The mass of the population were still of peasant stock wearing drab clothes and living in small houses, medical science had not developed to any great extent and the cities had remained small with the population of London being around the million mark; outbreaks of plague were still rumoured. The church governed everything with the Pope in Rome now a Yorkshireman from England. Hubert Anvil is a ten year old boy blessed with a superb soprano voice; the best in living memory and the story opens with him singing at the funeral of king Stephen III of England in 1976. The authorities agree that he must be castrated before his voice breaks, but Hubert is just starting to have an inkling of what he will be be sacrificing if the operation goes ahead.
Fornication under church rules is considered a sin, just about allowable in wedlock, but outside of this punishments can be severe. The clergy still operates under rules of celibacy and Hubert first learns about sex through observing a peasant couple going at it in the woods near his boarding school. His parents are from the wealthy merchant class and as usual in such families have their own pastor; father Lyall, however he falls in love with the merchants wife and is reluctant to sign the forms that will authorise Hubert’s operation. Amis gets to write about his favourite subject; illicit sex and the sexual awakening of a young boy, while the battle for Hubert’s balls rages within the church hierarchy. Amis tells the story well and there is a nice twist near the end to keep the reader entertained.
It is a short novel; just over 200 pages and so there is little opportunity for Amis to develop a complicated alternate world scenario. He does create an atmosphere of life within a strictly structured theocracy, but this takes second place to the story he wishes to tell. There is in the background the war against the Turks, the war against Islam, but the big war against science has been won:
“It was a close thing. A little longer, and science would have abolished God and brought our world to ruin”
In Amis’s alternate world there are throwaway lines that refer to famous artworks by the Netherlander de Kooning or the English Channel bridge engineered by Sopwith or the vast Turner ceiling in St Pauls. Amis provides just enough detail to sketch in the background to his story. It is an entertaining read, but whether the reader wishes to make of it a satire on religion, an alternate universe or a story of sexual awakening then he is free to do so. 3 stars from me.
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and times in post war Britain and was a great success; funny and slightly titillating. Subsequently there was criticism that his novels seemed to stray more and more into an outdated swinging sixties view of sex with accusations of misogyny. I think this is unfair: although it cannot be denied that Amis was always keen to write about sex especially in a way that sounded a little like he wanted to entertain with salacious views of his character lives, but in my opinion he also did much to debunk the hypocrisy surrounding the subject. No surprise then that the central story line in the Alteration concerns the castration of a 10 year old boy. The Alteration has plenty of surprises in store, for a start it could easily fit into the genre of science fiction being an alternate history of the world and could also be seen to be a damming indictment of religion. Amis’s alternate history stems from him imagining that Henry VIII never became king of England and that his older bother Arthur survived to claim the throne and together with his Spanish queen Catherine of Aragon tied the country to the Roman Catholic faith. Britain became a world power wedded to the Papacy and soon became a theocracy. The result was that progress was held back by about 200 years; electricity was considered by the church too dangerous to use, horse and cart was the transport used by the poor, a diesel engine has been invented and express carriages sped along the road system. The mass of the population were still of peasant stock wearing drab clothes and living in small houses, medical science had not developed to any great extent and the cities had remained small with the population of London being around the million mark; outbreaks of plague were still rumoured. The church governed everything with the Pope in Rome now a Yorkshireman from England. Hubert Anvil is a ten year old boy blessed with a superb soprano voice; the best in living memory and the story opens with him singing at the funeral of king Stephen III of England in 1976. The authorities agree that he must be castrated before his voice breaks, but Hubert is just starting to have an inkling of what he will be be sacrificing if the operation goes ahead.
Fornication under church rules is considered a sin, just about allowable in wedlock, but outside of this punishments can be severe. The clergy still operates under rules of celibacy and Hubert first learns about sex through observing a peasant couple going at it in the woods near his boarding school. His parents are from the wealthy merchant class and as usual in such families have their own pastor; father Lyall, however he falls in love with the merchants wife and is reluctant to sign the forms that will authorise Hubert’s operation. Amis gets to write about his favourite subject; illicit sex and the sexual awakening of a young boy, while the battle for Hubert’s balls rages within the church hierarchy. Amis tells the story well and there is a nice twist near the end to keep the reader entertained.
It is a short novel; just over 200 pages and so there is little opportunity for Amis to develop a complicated alternate world scenario. He does create an atmosphere of life within a strictly structured theocracy, but this takes second place to the story he wishes to tell. There is in the background the war against the Turks, the war against Islam, but the big war against science has been won:
“It was a close thing. A little longer, and science would have abolished God and brought our world to ruin”
In Amis’s alternate world there are throwaway lines that refer to famous artworks by the Netherlander de Kooning or the English Channel bridge engineered by Sopwith or the vast Turner ceiling in St Pauls. Amis provides just enough detail to sketch in the background to his story. It is an entertaining read, but whether the reader wishes to make of it a satire on religion, an alternate universe or a story of sexual awakening then he is free to do so. 3 stars from me.
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LibraryThing member yarb
Amis has lots of fun with his alternate world with its effing and jeffing Yorkshire Pope, nasty plods named Foot and Redgrave, and Jesuit theologian Jean-Paul Sartre among many others. He namechecks "The Man in the High Castle" early on so we know exactly where we stand. The result is a
The characterisation isn't really up to much though, and the plot requires a hefty last-minute authorial intervention to swing it back on course. But the plot isn't really the point.
I ended up feeling a bit sorry for my tomcat. Arguably four stars but let's be conservative
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fleet-of-foot satire of catholicism and communism with unintentional but pervasive steampunkiness.The characterisation isn't really up to much though, and the plot requires a hefty last-minute authorial intervention to swing it back on course. But the plot isn't really the point.
I ended up feeling a bit sorry for my tomcat. Arguably four stars but let's be conservative
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LibraryThing member wrichard
I thought this was funny. The following is PART of Oakesspalding's review of this book. Many thanks for astute comments, Oakes.
Here is a another alternate history, where the Roman Catholics are in charge. And Amis doesn't like them: A lover teaches a woman to experience "love" (orgasm) and the
Here is a another alternate history, where the Roman Catholics are in charge. And Amis doesn't like them: A lover teaches a woman to experience "love" (orgasm) and the
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Catholic secret police castrate him; two grotesque Vatican supported castrati put pressure on a young boy to become one of them; the Puritan American colonies are havens of innovation and free-thinking, and so on. This book is sharp, well-written, moving, and of course funny--it is Amis. This is a well-written and deeply moral book Show Less
LibraryThing member michigantrumpet
Kingsley brilliantly imagines a world in which the Reformation never occurred (Martin Luther becoming Pope Germanius I) and the western world has devolved into a Roman Catholic theocracy. 1973 Coventry, England's largest city, would be largely recognizable to real life citizens 150 years earlier.
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In this world, women, Jews and "Indians" are repressed, demeaned and marginalized. The plot turns on the great God given honor bestowed upon boy soprano Hubert, who has been chosen to be surgically altered to preserve forever his high youthful voice. His story serves as a springboard for sharp satire properly lambasting of tyranny in all forms. I normally don't enjoy dystopian novels, steampunk, or science fiction. In the hands of this comic master, I passed a quite enjoyable afternoon. Show Less
LibraryThing member edgeworth
The Alteration is an alternative history novel by Kingsley Amis which hinges on the premise that the Reformation failed, with Martin Luther becoming reconciled to the Catholic Church and indeed becoming Pope. The Western world remains under the influence of a repressive Catholic regime and
The Alteration compares itself early and openly to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, with Hubert and his dormitory friends huddling around a candle after lights out to read a fictionalised version of that very book – an alternate history which, of course, posits that the Reformation succeeded. (In real life The Man in the High Castle depicts a world in which the Allies lost World War II.) But while I criticised The Man in the High Castle for not having much of a plot, relying on the intrigue of its divergent world to get the reader through, The Alteration has a fairly good one. The prospect of Hugo’s castration – in which, as a minor, he has no say – is opposed by several of his friends and family members, and the book becomes a struggle to see whether or not they will be successful in standing up to the hierarchy of the Church. In the final sixty pages or so, as Hugo takes his fate into his own hands, it becomes a fairly captivating fugitive story. I found myself somewhat bored through the first half of the novel – Catholic stories always do that to me for some reason – but by the novel’s climax I was genuinely involved and hoping against hope that Hugo would succeed. I suppose the threat of castration is a fairly gut-felt plight for a male reader.
Without giving away the ending, I’ll say that the outcome of the novel was frustrating – something of a deus ex machina – although I suppose in the context of the story, which speaks at length about faith and God and God’s will, “divine intervention” is less irritating than it would have been in other stories.
The Alteration is an objectively good novel; it has a richness and a depth to it which largely slipped past my analytical abilities, dealing with piety and the human condition and the worth of art, and there are also a lot of subversive references to the 1970s I didn’t get until I read about them after (I didn’t realise, for example, that the Pope was Harold Wilson). It was also slow to get going, and a little too on the nose in some parts – the Machiavellian discussion the Pope has with his closest advisors towards the end of the novel was particularly clunky. Nonetheless, it’s a solid alternate history novel, and certainly one I can recommend to fans of the genre.
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scientific progress has been stymied. The story itself revolves around Hubert Anvil, a 10-year-old choir boy, who has the most wonderful singing voice heard in generations; a voice which must, by the reasoning of the celibate clergy, be preserved by Hugo’s castration – the second “alteration” of the title.The Alteration compares itself early and openly to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, with Hubert and his dormitory friends huddling around a candle after lights out to read a fictionalised version of that very book – an alternate history which, of course, posits that the Reformation succeeded. (In real life The Man in the High Castle depicts a world in which the Allies lost World War II.) But while I criticised The Man in the High Castle for not having much of a plot, relying on the intrigue of its divergent world to get the reader through, The Alteration has a fairly good one. The prospect of Hugo’s castration – in which, as a minor, he has no say – is opposed by several of his friends and family members, and the book becomes a struggle to see whether or not they will be successful in standing up to the hierarchy of the Church. In the final sixty pages or so, as Hugo takes his fate into his own hands, it becomes a fairly captivating fugitive story. I found myself somewhat bored through the first half of the novel – Catholic stories always do that to me for some reason – but by the novel’s climax I was genuinely involved and hoping against hope that Hugo would succeed. I suppose the threat of castration is a fairly gut-felt plight for a male reader.
Without giving away the ending, I’ll say that the outcome of the novel was frustrating – something of a deus ex machina – although I suppose in the context of the story, which speaks at length about faith and God and God’s will, “divine intervention” is less irritating than it would have been in other stories.
The Alteration is an objectively good novel; it has a richness and a depth to it which largely slipped past my analytical abilities, dealing with piety and the human condition and the worth of art, and there are also a lot of subversive references to the 1970s I didn’t get until I read about them after (I didn’t realise, for example, that the Pope was Harold Wilson). It was also slow to get going, and a little too on the nose in some parts – the Machiavellian discussion the Pope has with his closest advisors towards the end of the novel was particularly clunky. Nonetheless, it’s a solid alternate history novel, and certainly one I can recommend to fans of the genre.
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LibraryThing member electrascaife
An alternate history in which the Catholic church is the leading power in the world, it seems. In this world a young boy, his family, and his friends struggle with the church's demand that he has been chosen by God to have the most talented singing voice in an age and that he must serve God by
The world building is interesting, and it works well as a vehicle for discussing the abuse of power, especially religious power. A powerful - and very good - read.
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submitting to an alteration (castration) so that his voice will remain as it is.The world building is interesting, and it works well as a vehicle for discussing the abuse of power, especially religious power. A powerful - and very good - read.
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LibraryThing member larryking1
My Kingsley Amis reading marathon marches on, but this latest was quite a ride; but first, a word of caution from the UK's Guardian: MOST PEOPLE THINK CASTRATING CHOIRBOYS IS INHUMANE... AT THE HEIGHT OF THE CRAZE FOR MALE SOPRANOS [19TH CENTURY], 5,000 BOYS A YEAR WERE CASTRATED IN ORDER TO
So, imagine centuries ago, when Martin Luther challenged the Church, that rather than resisting him, thereby starting The Reformation, the Church fathers said, "Luther, come to Rome, we are making you Pope," what today's world would look like. Yep, a theocracy, perhaps a Western Iran? And that is the premise of this "counter-factual" novel, one that 'won' the award for best sci-fi novel for 1976! Now, cue up ten-year old boy soprano, Hubert Anvil, singing in an English cathedral during the funeral service of the just-deceased Pope (most Popes are English, but serve out of Rome), whose immaculate voice brings him to the attention of powerful Vatican officials. In short order, steps are taken, with Hubert's approval, to set in motion the procedures to have an, ahem, 'alteration.' But when Hubert at the same time discovers the biology behind it, as well as girls and sex, murder and mayhem ensue. Most enjoyable in this wildly entertaining literary fiction are the references to entities like the Benedict Arnold Memorial in NYC, the Second Mass of Mozart or the 20 Symphonies of Beethoven, an obscure American (the US is New England) playwright named Will Shakespeare, and, best of all, a heroic New England naval warfare hero, one Edgar Allen Poe! A fun and brilliant read!
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PRESERVE THEIR UNBROKEN VOICES. THOSE WHO PROVED MEDIOCRE MOULDERED AWAY IN PARISH CHOIRS, BUT THE SUCCESSFUL "SACRED MONSTERS" WERE COSSETED AND ADORED. (Now, decades ago, I knew a fellow whose "side gig" was pressing bootleg LP's of great Opera performances and selling them to enthusiasts and collectors. He swore to me that he had an actual recording of one such "castrato" whom he would not identify, but after he had downed a few, he would fantasize about putting his record on the market. Well, thanks to the internet, I searched for just such an item and it exists, a recording of the very last Castrato early in the 20th Century. Now, if I found this, you can too, and that is all I will say as I barely know what I am writing about and I do not want to think any more about it, lol!)So, imagine centuries ago, when Martin Luther challenged the Church, that rather than resisting him, thereby starting The Reformation, the Church fathers said, "Luther, come to Rome, we are making you Pope," what today's world would look like. Yep, a theocracy, perhaps a Western Iran? And that is the premise of this "counter-factual" novel, one that 'won' the award for best sci-fi novel for 1976! Now, cue up ten-year old boy soprano, Hubert Anvil, singing in an English cathedral during the funeral service of the just-deceased Pope (most Popes are English, but serve out of Rome), whose immaculate voice brings him to the attention of powerful Vatican officials. In short order, steps are taken, with Hubert's approval, to set in motion the procedures to have an, ahem, 'alteration.' But when Hubert at the same time discovers the biology behind it, as well as girls and sex, murder and mayhem ensue. Most enjoyable in this wildly entertaining literary fiction are the references to entities like the Benedict Arnold Memorial in NYC, the Second Mass of Mozart or the 20 Symphonies of Beethoven, an obscure American (the US is New England) playwright named Will Shakespeare, and, best of all, a heroic New England naval warfare hero, one Edgar Allen Poe! A fun and brilliant read!
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LibraryThing member antao
An example of a meta-literary uchronia. I remember coming across this word in its Portuguese equivalent “ucronia” many eons ago as I read a review of Amis’ “A Alteração”. It’s a term that did not pop up frequently even when we read stuff on SFional meta-analysis. Why? Because it's one
One might apply similar theories to why people rewrite history - Robert Harris, for instance, clearly has an imagination stirred by the Second World War and has produced several texts out of a desire to satisfy that imagination in a way that the historical and fictional narratives he reads and watches do not meet.
And if it's true that what motivates people to write is to fill a lack, then perhaps the fiction which does not provoke this kind of writing does not produce a lack in its most admiring readers. I can well believe that an avid Joycean might imagine in their head an alternative version of Bloomsday, but would they dare compete with him to write it in that style? Or perhaps they read not for the plot but for the style, so why bother to rewrite the story when what you really want is more of Joyce's writing, something only he can produce?
As for why historical Alternate Universes (as the plebby fanfic writers call them, sorry, I keep forgetting, “meta-literary uchronias”) only came into being at a certain moment: well, you can't have an alternative historical novel before you have the historical novel proper, and while fiction has always been set in the past, that past was not, generally, recreated with a sense of the historical distance between that past and the writer's present until Scott. So it's not at all surprising that the genre came into being after Scott's version of the historical novel had been assimilated.
What if the Spanish Armada hadn't sunk? What if the American Revolution never happened? What if the Confederates won the American Civil War and joined the Allies and the US joined the Axis powers (or rather their alternate universe equivalents)? What if we threatened the main character’s balls? “The Alteration” looked like some of some of Harry Turtledoves’s novels where alternate history books are a bit SF, like “The Guns of the South” where time-travellers give the Confederates AK-47s (in Amis’ novel the equivalent is snipping gonads…). Amis' Uchronia, ”The Alteration”, before anyone asks, is nothing new that we haven’t read before in SF but done much, much better.
SF = Speculative Fiction.
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of those “irregular verbs”: canonical literary novelists publish meta-literary uchronias; fans write homages; weirdos on the internet do some weird thing called fanfic which we will never admit does the same thing as a text written by a serious novelist and published by a named imprint. There are very interesting theories as to why people write fanfic, or meta-literary uchronias, as I'm going to call the genre from now on: one is that what motivates people to produce it is their desire for 'more' of something which is present in the text but they do not feel they have had enough of, and one is their desire to 'fill the gaps' of something which is absent in the text. So for instance fiction in which Jane Eyre marries St John Rivers might be motivated by a reader wanting more - perhaps of their interactions or of the possibility of a relationship between them which the text suggests but then cuts short.One might apply similar theories to why people rewrite history - Robert Harris, for instance, clearly has an imagination stirred by the Second World War and has produced several texts out of a desire to satisfy that imagination in a way that the historical and fictional narratives he reads and watches do not meet.
And if it's true that what motivates people to write is to fill a lack, then perhaps the fiction which does not provoke this kind of writing does not produce a lack in its most admiring readers. I can well believe that an avid Joycean might imagine in their head an alternative version of Bloomsday, but would they dare compete with him to write it in that style? Or perhaps they read not for the plot but for the style, so why bother to rewrite the story when what you really want is more of Joyce's writing, something only he can produce?
As for why historical Alternate Universes (as the plebby fanfic writers call them, sorry, I keep forgetting, “meta-literary uchronias”) only came into being at a certain moment: well, you can't have an alternative historical novel before you have the historical novel proper, and while fiction has always been set in the past, that past was not, generally, recreated with a sense of the historical distance between that past and the writer's present until Scott. So it's not at all surprising that the genre came into being after Scott's version of the historical novel had been assimilated.
What if the Spanish Armada hadn't sunk? What if the American Revolution never happened? What if the Confederates won the American Civil War and joined the Allies and the US joined the Axis powers (or rather their alternate universe equivalents)? What if we threatened the main character’s balls? “The Alteration” looked like some of some of Harry Turtledoves’s novels where alternate history books are a bit SF, like “The Guns of the South” where time-travellers give the Confederates AK-47s (in Amis’ novel the equivalent is snipping gonads…). Amis' Uchronia, ”The Alteration”, before anyone asks, is nothing new that we haven’t read before in SF but done much, much better.
SF = Speculative Fiction.
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LibraryThing member mkfs
An alternate-history novel, set in world where Martin Luther was made Pope. The West is a theocracy, electricity is the devil's work, but technology is not terribly different.
Clearly inspired by The Man In The High Castle, which makes an appearance.
Those hoping for a small helping of the wit of
Clearly inspired by The Man In The High Castle, which makes an appearance.
Those hoping for a small helping of the wit of
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Kingsley Amis will be disappointed, but his fixation on sex is in full force. Show Less
Subjects
Awards
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1976
Physical description
256 p.; 5.01 inches
ISBN
1590176170 / 9781590176177
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