Acquisitions (76): Pavane

Keith Roberts: Pavane (1968 / 1984 / 2000)

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Keith Roberts (1935-2000)


Keith Roberts: Pavane (1968)
[Finally Books, Birkenhead - 29/9/22]:

Keith Roberts. Pavane. 1968. Rev. ed. 1984. SF Masterworks. Millennium. London: Victor Gollancz, 2000.

Keith Roberts: Pavane (1968 / 1974)

Alternate Histories

The idea of alternative outcomes for pivotal events has long fascinated historians. What if Hannibal had defeated Rome? If Napoleon had won at Waterloo? If Germany had won the First World War? There are a number of essay collections exploring such possibilities.

As a sub-genre of SF, however, Alternate History took quite a while to establish itself. It wasn't, in fact, until the 1960s that it really began to flourish. There are a few inescapable titles which always come up when you discuss it: Keith Robert's novel-in-stories Pavane is probably the best known, but it's run a close second by Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle.

I bought a copy of Pavane in a second-hand shop the other day. This may seem odd, as I already own one, but there's an additional story included in all editions of the book published after 1984. The one I had was the garish-looking mid-70s paperback pictured above - which led me, some years ago now, to go to the lengths of xeroxing that extra story, 'The White Boat', to see just how it fitted into the narrative as a whole.

My new copy is the 'SF Masterworks' edition also pictured above. It seemed a more convenient way of gaining access to the entire text of Roberts' classic novel.

Alternative editions, alternative histories - I can't help feeling that there's a moral in there somewhere. In any case, in the meantime, here's my short list of some of the most interesting examples of this genre to date:

1. Ward Moore: Bring the Jubilee (1953)
2. Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)
3. Keith Roberts: Pavane (1968)
4. Vladimir Nabokov: Ada, or Ardor (1969)
5. Kingsley Amis: The Alteration (1976)
6. Michael Chabon: The Yiddish Policeman's Union (2007)
7. Stephen King: 11/22/63 (2011)

And here are the seven authors I've chosen to discuss:

1. Kingsley Amis (1922-1995)
2. Michael Chabon (1963- )
3. Philip K. Dick (1928-1982)
4. Stephen King (1947- )
5. Ward Moore (1912-1991)
6. Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)
7. Keith Roberts (1935-2000)

So why this particular set of seven? It begins and ends with a time travel yarn. You could, in fact, argue that Stephen King's focus on the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 is a direct echo of Ward Moore's choice of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 as his own turning point in American history.

The next title, Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle (1962) pairs off equally well with Michael Chabon's Yiddish Policeman's Union (2007), given that both deal with the possible consequences of a different outcome for World War II. Both are set entirely within the parameters of their alternative worlds, without time travel, moreover.

Our next pair, Keith Roberts' Pavane (1968) and Kingsley Amis's The Alteration (1976) are both concerned with the consequences - good and bad - of a Europe which never experienced the Reformation. Amis makes no secret of his debt to the earlier book.

The novel in the middle, Nabokov's Ada, is sui generis, and - unlike the others - does not seem to rely on a close acquaintance with this burgeoning sub-genre. Nabokov did, nevertheless, go to equally great lengths to flesh out the details of his alternate world:

The belief in a "twin" world, Terra, is widespread on Antiterra as a sort of fringe religion or mass hallucination. (The name "Antiterra" may be a back-formation from this; the planet is "really" called "Demonia".) One of [the protagonist Van Veen]'s early specialties as a psychologist is researching and working with people who believe that they are somehow in contact with Terra. Terra's alleged history, so far as he states it, appears to be that of our world: that is, the characters in the novel dream, or hallucinate, about the real world.

- Wikipedia

Let's sum up as follows, then:

• [Time travel: 1863] - Moore: Bring the Jubilee! (1953)
•• [Alternate WWII: Pacific Coast] - Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)
••• [No Reformation: in England] - Roberts: Pavane (1968)
•••• [Antiterra: 'Demonia'] - Nabokov: Ada, or Ardor (1969)
••• [No Reformation: in Europe] - Amis: The Alteration (1976)
•• [Alternate WWII: Alaska] - Chabon: Yiddish Policeman's Union (2007)
• [Time travel: 1963] - King: 11/22/63 (2011)

As the old (and variously attributed) saying has it: "History never repeats itself; the historians repeat each other; there is a wide difference."

In the case of Alternate Historical Fiction (AHF for short), the various authors of possible pasts - and futures - continue to repeat and rely on one another to such an extent that it's clear that the details of their predecessors' stories have as much influence on their creations as the actual facts of history.

Insofar as one can distinguish between the two, that is. Historians are, after all, writers too.

Books I own are marked in bold:

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Ward Moore: Bring the Jubilee (1953)


Joseph Ward Moore
(1903-1978)

This is, by common consent, the great grand-daddy of them all. Certainly it's the only book of Ward Moore's which is still widely read.

It's a fascinating yarn, worked out with a good deal of skill, but perhaps a little stronger in its analysis of the implications of a victory for Lee at Gettysburg than in actual human interest.

The theme of the Confederacy winning the Civil War and becoming an independent state was not a new one, as Winston Churchill's segment of If It Had Happened Otherwise [1931] and Murray Leinster's Sidewise in Time had toyed with the idea in the 1930s. However, Moore's book was more developed and reached a slightly wider audience than those two works, and encouraged many later writers to take up the same thread. Virtually all of them, however, depicted the USA rump state as doing better than in Moore's book.

- Wikipedia

Another interesting parallel is with outsider artist Henry Darger's 15,000-page fantasy novel The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, which offers two alternative endings to its immense narrative, strongly influenced by its author's own knowledge of the American Civil War.

In the first, the Vivian girls and their allies defeat the slave-owning empire of the Glandelinians, just as the Union did the Confederates. In the second, the atheist child-slavers mount an unexpected sneak attack, and triumph over the Christian nation of Abbieannia.



Ward Moore (1973)

Bibliography


Fiction:


1. Breathe the Air Again (1942)
2. Greener Than You Think (1947)
3. Bring the Jubilee (1953)
   • Bring the Jubilee! 1953. Gollancz Classic SF, 19. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1987.
4. Cloud By Day (1956)
5. [with Avram Davidson] Joyleg (1962)
6. [with Robert Bradford] Caduceus Wild (1978)
7. Lot & Lot's Daughter. 1953 & 1954 (1996)
8. Jupiter Save Us. 1954 (2011)
9. Transient. 1960 (2013)



Commdor: Bring the Jubilee Map (2009)




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Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)


Philip Kindred Dick
(1928-1982)

This was the first of Philip K. Dick's novels to receive serious attention from the literary establishment. His previous attempts to write 'mainstream' fiction had been unsuccessful, and the eight garish SF paperbacks he'd already published (along with a large number of stories in the pulps) had mainly earned him a reputation for competent workmanship speedily delivered.

The Man in the High Castle was the game-changer. It's obvious, in retrospect, how many 'Dick-ian' elements the story contains - the multiple plot-lines, philosophical disquisitions, and reliance on such transcendent elements such as the I-Ching, to mention just a few. At the time, though, the comparatively straightforward writing and packaging made it seem a more 'serious' novel than any of his others.

It remains a wonderfully readable novel - and its exploration of the mentality of American collaborators with the new Pan-Pacific co-prosperity regime is terrifyingly insightful. It may not be on a par with later, more characteristic works such as Ubik or The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, books which only Philip K. Dick could have written, but it remains one of the great might-have-beens of his career.

What if he'd managed to follow it up with something equally sober-sided, rather than with a couple of pulp paperbacks called The Game-Players of Titan and Martian Time-Slip (brilliant though the latter actually is)? Perhaps he might have become a kind of proto-Vonnegut, switching easily from mainstream to genre fiction?

The novel he did write next, We Can Build You, which didn't appear in print until 1972, is a groundbreaking application of the Android theme to his own explorations of the Civil War (are there hints there of an hommage to Bring the Jubilee?). His agent didn't like it, though, so the doors which seemed to have been opened by the favourable critical reaction to The Man in the High Castle slammed shut once again.

His reputation didn't really recover until twenty years later, with the premiere of the movie Blade Runner, based on his 1968 classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By then, unfortunately, Dick was dead.



Neon Dystopia: Philip K. Dick (2020)

[Bibliography]


1. The Man in the High Castle (1962)
   • The Man in the High Castle. 1962. Penguin Science Fiction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
   • The Man in the High Castle. 1962. Penguin Classic Science Fiction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997.
   • Four Novels of the 1960s: The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik. 1962, 1964, 1968, 1969. Ed. Jonathan Lethem. The Library of America, 173. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2007.



RobintheHighCastle: The Man in the High Castle: Plausible World (2019)




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Keith Roberts: Pavane (1968)


Keith John Kingston Roberts
(1935-2000)

The idea of an England where the Reformation never really happened is certainly a beguiling one: all that stained glass unbroken, all those cathedrals and priories still standing ...

Probably the reason people keep reading Pavane, though, is the expert way in which Keith Roberts keeps his focus on the human dimensions of his alternate world. The politics of this England are certainly no less entangled and punishing than those of the 'real' Elizabethan England.

He's different from Moore and Dick in that he doesn't really see this alternative time-line as a dreadful mistake. There are hints throughout The Man in the High Castle that Japan and Germany did not really win the war - the Oracle at the heart of the novel, the Chinese I-Ching, or Book of Changes, states as much in no uncertain terms, in fact.

Ward Moore has his historian hero reverse the inconvenient victory of the Confederate cause by an inadvertent appearance at a crucial moment in the battle. Roberts, by contrast, seems more fascinated by the new world he's created than concerned to make moral judgments about its ultimate desirability.

Roberts' prose is rich and elegant, and the story he tells is a compelling one by any standards. He may be known mainly for this one book, but many of his other works - especially the various collections of short stories, his favourite form - are well worth exploring, too.



Forbidden Planet: Keith Roberts (1987)

Bibliography


Novels:


1. The Furies (1966)
2. Pavane (1968)
   1. The Lady Margaret
   2. The Signaller
   3. Brother John
   4. Lords and Ladies
   5. Corfe Gate
   6. Coda
   • Pavane. 1968. Panther Science Fiction. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1974.
3. Anita (1970)
4. The Inner Wheel (1970)
5. The Boat of Fate (1971)
6. The Chalk Giants (1974)
7. Molly Zero (1980)
8. Pavane. Rev. ed. (1984)
   1. The Lady Margaret
   2. The Signaller
   3. The White Boat
   4. Brother John
   5. Lords and Ladies
   6. Corfe Gate
   7. Coda
   • [‘Fifth Measure: The White Boat’. In Pavane. 1968. Expanded Edition. 1984. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988. 151-74.]
   • Pavane. 1968. Rev. ed. 1984. SF Masterworks. Millennium. London: Victor Gollancz, 2000.
9. Kiteworld (1985)
10. Kaeti & Company (1986)
11. Gráinne (1987)
12. The Road to Paradise (1989)
13. Kaeti on Tour (1992)
14. Drek Yarman (2000)

Short Stories:


15. Machines and Men (1973)
    1. Escapism (1964)
    2. Therapy 2000 (1969)
    3. Manscarer (1966)
    4. Boulter's Canaries (1965)
    5. Sub-Lim (1965)
    6. Synth (1966)
    7. The Deeps (1966)
    8. Breakdown (1966)
    9. The Pace That Kills (1966)
    10. Manipulation (1965)
16. The Grain Kings (1976)
    1. Weihnachtsabend (1972)
    2. The White Boat (1966)
    3. The Passing of the Dragons (1972)
    4. The Trustie Tree (1973)
    5. The Lake of Tuonela (1973)
    6. The Grain Kings (1972)
    7. I Lose Medea (1972)
17. The Passing of the Dragons: Selected Stories (1977)
18. Ladies from Hell (1979)
    1. Our Lady of Desperation (1979)
    2. The Shack at Great Cross Halt (1977)
    3. The Ministry of Children (1975)
    4. The Big Fans (1977)
    5. Missa Privata (1976)
19. The Lordly Ones (1986)
    1. The Lordly Ones (1980)
    2. Ariadne Potts (1978)
    3. Sphairistike (1984)
    4. The Checkout (1981)
    5. The Comfort Station (1980)
    6. The Castle on the Hoop (1986)
    7. Diva (1986)
20. Winterwood and Other Hauntings. Introduction by Robert Holdstock (1989)
    1. Susan (1965)
    2. The Scarlet Lady (1966)
    3. The Eastern Windows (1967)
    4. Winterwood (1974)
    5. Mrs. Cibber (1989)
    6. The Snake Princess (1973)
    7. Everything in the Garden (1973)

Poetry:


21. A Heron Caught in Weeds: Poems. Ed. Jim Goddard (1987)

Non-fiction:


22. The Natural History of the P.H. ["Primitive Heroine"] (1988)
23. Irish Encounters: A Short Travel (1989)
24. Lemady: Episodes of a Writer's Life (1997)



Corfe Castle (2019)




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Vladimir Nabokov: Ada, or Ardor (1969)


Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
(1899-1977)

This may seem like a curious choice, but the idea of Antiterra was clearly an important one for Nabokov. Like the imaginary northern land 'Zembla' in his previous novel, Pale Fire (1962), the planet of Demonia, or Antiterra, allowed him to explore certain themes which might have seem more shocking if placed in the more conventional Middle-American surrounds of, say, Lolita (1955).

It is, after all, a novel about incest. And yet it's never attracted the same passionate philippics as his earlier works. This may be partially because so few people have actually read it, mind you. Even by Nabokov's standards it's quite a tough nut to crack.

It could be argued that Nabokov might have done well to learn more from his predecessors in the art of world-building (as he declined to do in his rather tin-eared SF story 'Lance'). Nevertheless, the weird counter-world he creates certainly embodies a genuine yearning for another life-path on his part, or so the reader is led to assume.

His greatest defender, Brian Boyd, has claimed that the cruel way in which the golden couple Van and Ada treat their sibling Lucette lies at the emotional heart of the novel, and that Van's self-serving memoirs are by no means the whole of the message this fiction sets out to convey. Boyd may well be correct, but if so the morality of the whole thing has been very effectively disguised: it comes across - at least in parts - as a paean of praise for entitlement and privilege, which may be one reason it's not more widely read.

Another critic, David Auerbach, has argued that Van Veen is an unreliable narrator and that much of the story is Van's fantasy. This would negate its claims to be regarded as a 'true' alternate history, but at this point our terminology really begins to break down. Where, after all, is 'truth' in the realms of fiction? We all feel that realism is 'truer' than 'fantasy', but saying exactly how and why quickly embroils us in paradox. Perhaps, as Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost reminds us, "the truest poetry is the most feigning."



Vladimir Nabokov

[Bibliography]


1. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969)
   • Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. 1969. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971.
   • Novels 1969-1974: Ada, or Ardor: a Family Chronicle / Transparent Things / Look at the Harlequins!. 1969, 1972, 1974. Ed. Brian Boyd. The Library of America, 89. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1996.



Dieter E. Zimmer: The Geography of Antiterra (2009-10)




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Kingsley Amis: The Alteration (1976)


Sir Kingsley William Amis
(1922-1995)



Just as The Man in the High Castle features a book titled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, depicting a world (but not our own) in which the Axis powers lost World War II, so The Alteration refers to an alternate history book by one Philip K. Dick entitled The Man in the High Castle. This book-within-a-book depicts a world in which Stephen II was never born, so the "Holy Victory" never happened, and Henry VIII became king legitimately. As in reality, Henry married Catherine of Aragon, but their son Henry, Duke of Cornwall survived infancy, becoming Henry IX in 1547. Martin Luther became "schismatic" in this world, as he did in reality, and a "Union" of former English North American colonies breaks away in 1848 instead of 1776, conquering most of North America. ... Galliard, an alternative-universe counterpart to Keith Roberts's Pavane, is also mentioned in [Amis's] tribute to the subgenre.

- Wikipedia

Kingsley Amis was always fond of straying onto the genre side of the fictional fence - just as long as he was guaranteed a safe return to the loftier fields of mainstream fiction. He wrote, among others, a James Bond sequel, a ghost story, a period detective yarn, and - here - a piece of genuinely visionary science fiction.

Like Keith Roberts, he imagines a world where the Reformation has not taken place: instead, Martin Luther became Pope.

Most of the narrative, however, centres on a young boy who is resisting the demand that he allow himself to be made a castrato to guarantee the continuance of his superb soprano voice. The moral dilemma here - expediency against individual choice - is muffled somewhat by the novel's ambiguous climax, but it remains a dazzling effort, written with Amis's characteristic clarity and certainty of voice.



Kingsley Amis

[Bibliography]


Science Fiction:


1. New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (1960)
   • New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction. 1960. A Four Square Book. London: New English Library Limited., 1963.
2. The Alteration (1976)
   • The Alteration. 1976. Triad / Panther Books. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Triad Paperbacks Ltd, 1978.
3. Russian Hide-and-Seek (1980)
   • Russian Hide-and-Seek: A Melodrama. 1980. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.

Edited:


4. [with Robert Conquest] Spectrum anthology series. 5 vols (1961-66)
   • Spectrum I: A Science Fiction Anthology. Ed. Kingsley Amis & Robert Conquest. 1961. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1964.
   • Spectrum II: A Second Science Fiction Anthology. Ed. Kingsley Amis & Robert Conquest. 1962. Pan Science Fiction. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1965.
   • Spectrum III: A Third Science Fiction Anthology. Ed. Kingsley Amis & Robert Conquest. London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1963.
   • Spectrum IV: A Fourth Science Fiction Anthology. Ed. Kingsley Amis & Robert Conquest. 1965. Pan Science Fiction. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1967.
   • Spectrum V: A Fifth Science Fiction Anthology. Ed. Kingsley Amis & Robert Conquest. 1966. Pan Science Fiction. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1969.
5. The Golden Age of Science Fiction (1981)
   • The Golden Age of Science Fiction. London: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 1981.



The Alteration (1976)




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Michael Chabon: The Yiddish Policeman's Union (2007)


Michael Chabon
(1963- )

The apparent absurdity of its title hides a gloomy, introverted, yet strangely beautiful novel. If the mere idea of Alternate Histories encourages writers to produce work like this, then all power to it, I would say.

It's definitely on a par with Wonder Boys and Kavalier and Clay, Chabon's earlier triumphs. Nothing he's written since is quite on that level, but you never know - where there's life and a working laptop, there's still hope.

As usual with Chabon, the process of composition does not seem to have been without its speedbumps:

In late 2003, Chabon mentioned the novel on his web site, saying that it was titled Hotzeplotz in a reference to the "Yiddish expression 'from here to Hotzeplotz,' meaning more or less the back of nowhere, Podunk, Iowa, the ends of the earth." In 2004, Chabon said the (retitled) book would be published in fall 2005, but then the writer decided to trash his most recent draft and start over. His publisher HarperCollins pushed the publication date back to April 11, 2006. Chabon's rejected 600-page draft featured the same characters as the novel he eventually published but "a completely different story," and was also written in the first person.

In December 2005, Chabon announced a second delay to the novel's release, claiming that the manuscript was complete but that he felt that HarperCollins was rushing the novel into publication ... [It] was released on May 1, 2007. Chabon has said that the novel was difficult to write, calling it "an exercise in restraint all around... The sentences are much shorter than my typical sentences; my paragraphs are shorter than my typical paragraphs." He also described the novel as an homage to the writing of mystery writers Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross Macdonald, along with Russian writer Isaac Babel.

- Wikipedia

Chabon doesn't mention Philip K. Dick, but there seems little doubt that The Man in the High Castle must have influenced the nature of his own post-World-War-II dystopia.



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Michael Chabon

[Bibliography]


1. The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007)
   • The Yiddish Policemen's Union. 2007. Fourth Estate. London: HarperCollins Publishers / Australia: Griffin Press, 2007.



Land of the Lost (2007)




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Stephen King: 11/22/63 (2011)


Stephen Edwin King
(1947- )

This is not, in my own humble opinion, one of Stephen King's strongest novels. You'll see in my recent online rankings that I've placed it 47th of his 66 novels.

It certainly has its points of interest, however. The Time Cop idea is a fairly familiar one, as is the notion of endless corrections applied to one's initial piece of world-bending via time travel.

I guess the real heart of the matter lies in an American of King's generation coming to terms with the tarnished image of Camelot: the notion that there once was a true 'gunslinger' president, firm but fair, a bit flawed in character but basically good.

It was never really true, alas, and King's recognition of the damage done by this faith in illusions is central to his novel. Perhaps W. B. Yeats expressed it best, in his 'Meditations in Time of Civil War':

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love ...

Too much self-deception leads, eventually, to self-destruction. Perhaps that's the real reason why "there are no second acts in American lives," as F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed.



Leemage/Corbis: Stephen King (2019)

[Bibliography]


1. 11/22/63 (2011)
   • 11/22/63. Scribner. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2011.



Stephen King: 11/22/63 (2011)




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Phillip Mann: A Land Fit for Heroes (4 vols: 1993-96)


There are certainly plenty of other examples I could have included: I've written elsewhere about Phillip Mann's A Land Fit for Heroes tetralogy. Robert Silverberg, too, has toyed with the idea of a world where the Roman empire never fell in his Roma Eterna.

The seven cited above should give you a pretty good idea of the potential of the genre, however: both where it's been and where it may still go - in this world if not all its alternate timestreams ...



Robert Silverberg: Roma Eterna (2003)




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• category - SF: Authors

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