Customer Reviews

Greybeard

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Elegantly written for a book of this type, Brian Aldiss creates a near future world in which nuclear testing has gone awry, temporarily allowing some hard radiation from the sun to saturate the earth, destroying the ability of larger mammals including humans to reproduce themselves. There are two parallel stories, one which takes place in a sad present when the youngest human beings are well into their fifties, and the other in three separate periods gradually ranging back in time to just after the initial accident. The reader therefore sees the present in light of the turbulent events of the previous fifty years when everything began to unravel.

The two main characters, Greybeard and his wife, are immensely likeable and realistic. Unlike some of Brian Aldiss's later works, this is an old fashioned book, easy to read and well plotted. The most interesting feature of the book is the immensely sad world created by the author; what's the point to life if you can't pass on your genes to another generation?

The characters must figure that out along the way.

If you like John Wyndham's and John Christopher's end of the world stories, you're bound to appreciate this one as well.

It was a book of Tim White's fantasy art that led me to "Greybeard". An illustration of an abandoned town, weeds sprouting from cracks in the road, half-ruined buildings covered in ivy - a scene typical of the post-disaster genre. I was intrigued by the premise behind it.

The explosion of radioactive weapons in space has disrupted Earth's protective van Allen Belt, saturating the planet with massive doses of radiation. This has resulted in sickness, deformity and sterility for the human race. In the years following the "Accident" civilization has been in steady decline, as there will be no more future generations.

Algernon Timberlane (better known as Greybeard) was six years old at the time of the disaster. He has grown up in a world that has become increasingly primitive and quiet as people succumb to old age or cancers caused by the fallout. By the time Greybeard is in his mid fifties he is one of the youngest people left in the world. England has become a wilderness thinly populated by tribes of old people living with untreatable ailments. Savage animals, no longer afraid of man, roam the countryside in packs. Some people claim to have seen goblins lurking in the shadows. With each passing year people grow more frail and feeble-minded.

This is the first novel I've read by Brian Aldiss, the man who identified John Wyndham with the "Cosy Catastrophe". "Greybeard" is a novel John Wyndham would certainly have approved of. The catastrophe that shaped this decrepit future is, however, far from cosy. A book like "Greybeard" would be a good way to argue in favour of the need for human cloning. It could well save our species.

One of the best of the "end of the world" books, written by one the select members of the group known as the "world destroyers" back in the fifties and sixties. I began reading science fiction before I was even in junior high, and for me, this was one of the most memorable. It is still one of the best (I can count those I would consider 'the best' on one hand). The atmosphere that Aldiss creates for us begins on the first page, in the first paragraph, in the first sentence. This book will stay with me for the rest of my life. (Several years ago, I managed to find a first edition. Now, if I could just get it signed...)

Brian Aldiss seems to have a limited following with the wider science fiction community only recognizing Non-Stop (excellent!), Long Afternoon Of Earth (great!), and Helliconia Spring (haven't read it yet) as his landmark novels. I've read five of his novels and each one has been a 4- or 5-star rating, among them Starswarm, Cryptozoic, and Earthworks. Each one of these books highlights Brian Aldiss's masterful gift for creating a setting which is detailed and absorbing. Greybeard is no different - it opens your eyes and keeps them glued to the pages.

Rear cover synopsis:

"After the Accident, the Dark Ages return to Earth. By the year 2029 A.D. few survivors remain. Those who are left huddle in isolated villages, prisoners of fear, superstition, and old age. The rare man who still wants to shape his own destiny must strike out into the unknown. Greybeard is the story of such a man and his wife - of their perilous journey through a landscape weirdly familiar, eerily changed. And of their quest for something they dare not name..."

Algy Timberlane and his wife Martha met during childhood, in the the early years after the Accident in 1981. Both aged seven years old and both recovering from radiation-related illnesses, they will discover that their lives will be intermeshed through the world war in 2001, through the cholera outbreak in 2018, and through the reclusive years after the sequential disasters in 2029. The Big Accident having wiped out most large mammals and rendering nearly all of humanity sterile, only weasels, reindeer, beavers, otters, and coypu are left to either eat or provide some sort of utility to the remaining humans dotting the English countryside... while "the mammal with the big brain eked out his dotage in small communities." (71) With an average age of seventy and where 50 years of age is considered to be young, the hope for the future is dim: "Mortal flesh now wore only the Gothic shapes of age. Death stood impatiently over the land, waiting to count his last few pilgrims." (39)

Algy Timberlane (aka Greybeard), now aged 54 in the year 2029, started to work for DOUCH(E) during the war in 2001. DOUCH(E) stands for Documentation of Universal Contemporary History (England) and Algy's job is to simply place himself where history is being made and make recordings of history unfolding: "...someone should leave behind a summary of earth's decline, if only for visiting archeologists from other possible worlds." (83) His wife Martha is at his side when they decide to escape their community as it experiences a surge of unrest. Fleeing the hermetic village with the couple is the chaplain, Charley, five years Algy's senior, who provides optimistic countenance to Algy's own spiral of negativity. Also, the trapper and somewhat dim-witted Jeff Pitt is along for the perilous journey, who has been Algy's peripheral sidekick since the days of training with DOUCH when Jeff was ordered to assassinate Algy.

The seven chapters of Greybeard alternate between the escape from the village and downstream journey to the shore in the years 2029-2031 with that of historical background of the (1) year 1982 when the year after the "fatal bombs in space") and we reader witnesses a key event in Algy's life: his chance encounter with the hairless girl next door and the suicide of his father. (2) In the years 2000-2001 Algy receives training with DOUCH and experiences a unfortunate event which solidifies the bond between the Algy and his fiancé. (3) In the year 2018, cholera began to take it toll and escape from the dictatorial urban center was the only choice in order to survive.

Like all the other Aldiss novels I've read, the author pens a richly detailed novel interspersed with cavernous emotion, inspiring allegories, and romantic prose: "Year by year, as the living died, the empty rooms about him would multiply, like the cells of a giant hive that no bees visited, until they filled the world. The time would come when he would be a monster, alone in the rooms, in the tracks of his search, in the labyrinth of his hollow footsteps." (129) The reader will certainly get a feel for the desolation of the bucolic English countryside in contrast to the effervescent hope which bubbles from unknown emotional depths. Aldiss peppers Greybeard with fun little words like "sedgey" and "cavil" and "pundit" with some interesting formal words like "metoposcopy" and "katabatic winds" and "catenary" and then there's always the rare long words you come across once a year like "peregrination" and "tatterdemalion".

Greybeard may not be the best place to start when tackling the Aldiss bibliography, but it's certainly a prized mantelpiece for post-apocalyptic fiction, once which infuses barrenness with hope, self-destruction with mollification, and fatalism with transcendence.

There are times when the world ends, and there are times when your world ends. This book is more or less about the difference between the two.

There's a whole genre of books out there where civilization doesn't end in a blazing hail of fire, but with a more sobering whimper as society gently crumbles around itself and everyone who is left in the pieces have to figure out how best to use the time remaining to them, because putting things back to how they were won't be an option. Aldiss, being British, can't help but sprinkle his work with a certain melancholy that skirts just shy of full blown "On the Beach" style depression. It's something about the country that infuses their science-fiction with an elegant weariness, like falling asleep after walking for miles in the snow. Sure, it will kill you, but after all that effort sometimes it's just a relief to stop.

"Greybeard" takes us into a fairly unique scenario . . . the whole adult population of earth gets sterilized. There's an accident up in the atmosphere and suddenly nobody is getting pregnant anymore. Not a problem, the human race figures. Whatever this is will probably wear off and we'll get back to making babies and filling every corner of the planet in no time.

Fast forward a few decades and clearly that hasn't happened. The Earth has basically become one big nursing home, as the youngest people on the planet are now in their fifties, and not getting younger. Suddenly everyone in the world is an AARP member and having to face the inevitable . . . once they're gone, that's it.

This could have been played for laughs, and early scenes do toy with the utter absurdity of old people fighting each other and a population trying to scrape out a living in the ruins of civilization while also worrying about hearing loss and whether they have enough fiber in their diet. Greybeard is young enough to not have these problems yet, but he's also been around long enough to know this is the way the world is going, and when he reaches the age of these people, who is going to be around to take care of him? So, feeling the threat of stagnation breathing around his neck, he and his wife go exploring, to try to find a life that might be different. That might not be ossifying into a slow fade out.

But Aldiss does an interesting thing here, which is show us where these people have wound up and then take us back to depict how they started to get here in the first place, the gradual breaking down of the world that results when no one new comes to take the place of the people who are turning gray. It's in the little touches, the minor breakdowns that warn us about the end and wind up being catastrophic. The ones we never really see coming. It's the toy companies that are the canaries in the coal mine . . . when no one young in existence, there's no one around to buy toys. Not every disaster comes with a mushroom cloud. And more and more as we sink our way into a history that is striving toward a point where history will no longer exist, we realize the story is about absence, decay turning into renewal and what it leaves behind. Society adapting to what is no longer there, everyone coming up against impossible situations, staring the wall in the face and deciding to make camp there in order to make the best of it. People make little adjustments at first, as the population shrinks, as everyone gets older. A tweak here, a change there and it's not until years pass that anyone can take stock and see how much has changed. That's how society works in the novel, the greatest changes don't come sweeping, but creep up on us until one day it's just how things always are. Like the first day you find a gray hair, and realize there's really no turning back now.

I wish I could say the book is about how Greybeard and his wife begin to rebuild civilization, how mankind starts to scratch its way back up to dominance. But it's not about that and that's fine There's a calm elegance in seeing England going back to its wild roots, trees and forests taking over towns, Richard Jefferies "Wild England" finally coming true. No one is happy about this, but everyone accepts it because what else can you do? Mankind is done and it's all over but the aging, so instead we watch Greybeard play observer to a history that won't matter anymore because no one will be around to remember it. It's not a story about winning or succeeding, but persisting and accepting, about finally realizing that you can find a place for yourself in the midst of the collapse. The clock of nature turns back while the age of everyone constantly turns forward and there's a haunting quality as we leapfrog from the days when everyone could remember what young was, to steps toward the final graying, where old-timers shuffle through the disintegrating ruins of the majesties they once created, the towers growing more vine-covered and fading with each new day. But what good is making your mark upon the world, if there's no one left to be impressed?

Maybe the only answer really is a sigh, but there's some dignity in that, too, and in the quiet lives of these characters, and in this world, growing younger even as the years plod on.

The story follows the lives of a small group of human survivors of a nuclear accident. The "Accident", as it is referred to, has made male humans infertile. As the surviving population slowly dies off, the remaining groups of elderly people struggle to find hope in a bleak environment. One group, led by a man called Greybeard, have lived for many years in a small, isolated town along the river. They decide to venture down the river, to seek out the truth of rumors spread by travelers that children and fertile humans still survive in isolated pockets of the land. This is mostly a dark novel, with a few moving moments, and some beautifully descriptive writing. It is short on action.

This is an absolutely horrid book. I had to read it for a science fiction literature class. After 20 pages, whenever I'd finish a page, I'd tear it out of the book. Absolutley horrible book. One book was worse in the course...the blatherings of an old indian druggie who a city twirp thought was nirvana's wisdom personified....Journey to Ixltan...the worst science fiction book.