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Brian W. Aldiss

Barefoot in the Head Paperback – September 21, 2009

by Brian Aldiss (Author)

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'Everyone's touched! Don't be taken in by appearances here. Believe me, the old world has gone, but its shell remains in place. One day soon, there will come a breath of wind, a new messiah, the shell will crumple, and the kids will run, screaming, barefoot in the head, through lush new imaginary meadows. What a time to be young!' Barefoot in the Head is a tale of a future world recovering from a holocaust of hallucinogenic chemical weapons. For the victims, reality is a fluid mixture of the real, the imaginary and the nightmarish, the past, present and future. Colin Charteris, the hero and anti-hero on this continually disintegrating stage, has not himself survived the cataclysm unscathed, and his gradual descent into fantastic and paranoid visions will have drastic consequences for civilization. Brian Aldiss, in a psychedelic tour de force of inventive, playful narrative, owing as much to the methods of James Joyce and the experimentalism of William S. Burroughs as to H. G. Wells, goes light-years beyond the conventions of the genre to tell his story.

Print length

236 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Faber and Faber
Publication date

September 21, 2009
Dimensions

4.96 x 0.59 x 7.79 inches
ISBN-10

057124646X
ISBN-13

978-0571246465
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Faber and Faber; Main edition (September 21, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 236 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 057124646X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0571246465
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.96 x 0.59 x 7.79 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #5,695,119 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Autonomeus

A psychedelic, messianic, Joycean trip

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 4, 2021

"Barefoot in the Head" (1969), is a bizarre Joycean novel about Europe following the Acid Head War and the dropping of PCA bombs (Psycho-Chemical Aerosols). It was originally published as a series of connected stories called "The Acid Head Wars" in New Worlds, the flagship of science fiction's New Wave, edited by Michael Moorcock, and then collected into a "fix-up" novel.

There are three main features to Aldiss's construction: 1) the psychedelic landscape created by the long-lasting PCA bombs, 2) a messianic plot featuring Colin Charteris, who starts a motorized caravan and preaches higher consciousness, inspired by Ouspensky's popularization of Gurdjieff, and 3) a Joycean experimental style of broken syntax and neologisms which is maddening to read, but periodically hilarious and amusing.

I read it in college in 1975 not long after "Gravity's Rainbow" and back-to-back with "Dhalgren" by Samuel R. Delany. My frame of mind was, shall we say, quite conducive to the concept. I also read Ouspensky's "In Search of the Miraculous" that year, and it may be that it was "Barefoot In the Head" that led me to it. It's not clear whether it is just the character that is preaching Ouspensky or whether it was Aldiss, but the ideas give the book a compelling coherence that it might have otherwise lacked.

The Ace paperback I read back in 1975 featured an amazing cover by Leo & Diane Dillon.

*** *** ***
I recently re-read the book in the form of the original stories collected in Aldiss's Complete Short Stories. My reaction was the same as it was the first time -- amusement and awe mixed with annoyance at the fragmented style.

(verified purchase from Amazon of the Brian Aldiss Collection/The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s (Part 4))

2 people found this helpful

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T Bone

Thank You CRB for the book reccomendation.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 1, 2017

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Chris Robinson recommended this book to me. Thanks Chris. Interesting read.

One person found this helpful

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Prakash Mackay

the book arrived on time one of the pages was ...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 18, 2015

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the book arrived on time one of the pages was actually torn so I'll have to imagine what comes there otherwise I am satisfied

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Nargosta

"We warn the predelics we're powered"

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 11, 2021

SPOILERS

The time is the near future as of writing (roughly the 1970s). Kuwait has attacked most of the advanced countries of the world with psycho-chemical aerosol bombs.

The protagonist is a young Serb whose real name is not known. He is an Anglophile and a fan of the "Saint" novels of Leslie Charteris, and adopted the name Colin Charteris at some point. In his immediate backstory, he had worked in a refugee camp in Italy for victims of the chemicals. (It is mentioned obliquely that he got dosed after having sex with one of them.) As the book opens, he is traveling on his own to England. He has a brief drug vision of matter as a hallucination and true reality as a web of simultaneous branching possibilities. He will convert this into a vague "philosophy of movement" in which the new possibilities will be created by driving constantly. In England he will be hailed as a saint (one of the book's jokes). He leads his followers on a caravan with no destination.

Charteris is not a deceiver: he believes in the truth of his vision. He is not a saint, let alone the Messiah. He does not raise anyone from the dead, though asked to. His comical "resurrection" is simply that one of his followers begs Charteris to switch cars, with the result that the follower is killed in the ensuing crash on the highway and Charteris survives.

I wrote "comical," but this is a dark novel (it may have influenced Stephen King's story, "The End of the Whole Damn Thing") and the comedy is not funny but cruel. The world doesn't end, but Western civilization ("wesciv") is breaking down. In Germany, one character casually refers to the death by starvation of six or seven million Germans since no one is farming. The protagonists are fed human flesh but don't appear to notice or care. Across Europe, cities are burning. Years before King, Aldiss had mastered the art of matter of fact horror narration. About a doomed flight:

"Brasher's plane was one of the last to fly. It brought the members of the Stockholm Precognitive Congress back to Great Britain on flight S614 leaving Arlanda Airport from Runway 3 at 1145 hours local time or maybe it was later because the airport clock had taken to marking an imperceptible time of its own and your pilot was Captain Mats Hammarstrom who welcomes you a bored-looking man whose wooden face conceals a maelstrom of beauty caught from the falling aerosoused air."

Charteris is an un-self-aware sociopath, and trails death and destruction wherever he goes. When a rival leader starts punching him, he flings his attacker out into traffic in an emotionless trance, causing the death of the attacker and an innocent bystander in the resulting pileup. Charteris explains it away as just one of the multi-leveled events of reality. He takes the dead man's wife Angeline for a lover (which doses her), gets her pregnant, betrays her repeatedly, plans to leave her behind as a gift to another man, and at one point impulsively tries to kill her as "a terminal alternative" (she being a witness to his crime). As a spiritual figure, he is worthless. One despairing follower commits suicide in front of him, and he ignores it. He advises one woman to leave her husband and have sex with him, foreseeing that she and her husband will reunite in the future. The woman soon dies of an overdose of street drugs. Charteris, the prophet of multiple possibilities, casually contradicts himself: "She was destined." We are told of people struggling to hold things together, but Charteris believes in destroying the old world so that a better one will appear. Spoiler: it doesn't.

Chekhov advised writers to "be more cold." Aldiss is in control and very cold. Charteris is the framing character, and from his point of view everything is multicolored and "sparky." The reader has to look carefully around the main story and through increasing amounts of Joycean wordplay to notice that the world of the book is gray, grim, and in decline, and people are locked into their own heads, treating each other with callous indifference. Early on, Charteris thinks: "At least rainbows will flutter in those dark valleys where I shall tread," which catches it perfectly. Aldiss is a *good* writer.

Charteris tries to write a philosophical book called "Man The Driver," strewing manuscript pages around, but the project never goes anywhere. In the same way, the hippie period didn't leave any real literature of its own behind. But Aldiss, an onlooker from a previous generation, was able to convert it into literature while it was going on. The science fiction device of the PCA bombs has prevented the book from dating very much. The portrayal of women is very dated, though accurate that in anarchy, women get the worst of it. Angeline is a sympathetic character (she is aware that there is a future, and recognizes that Charteris isn't building anything). But she is needy and weak, and after being treated by Charteris about as badly as anyone can be, she stays with him. Other women characters are similar. The Joycean device works as a representation of being under the influence of the PCAs, but when used in passages about sex it is only embarrassing. (Joyce, raised a repressed Catholic, handles sex in Finnegans Wake in a "tee hee, I'm making lots of wordplay about naughty things" way that strikes the contemporary reader as puerile. Aldiss, who was not repressed, copies Joyce in this.) Aldiss' own device of seizing on certain words like "loot" and "sparky" and driving them like workhorses through the book can grate. But his device of letting the characters get images from the future, without the ability to change it, gives the book structure.

Some of the best things are the small, grounding details amid all the PCA-induced daze. Freeways are being enlarged with lanes twice as wide, so drivers incapable of focusing on details won't crash as much. In starving Belgium, the police are away raiding adjacent countries for cattle. France was spared because it supplied the aircraft to Kuwait.

"The bombing here had been heavy as the millionaire Kuwaiti pilots themselves flipped in a gone thing and the psycho-chemicals rained down."

This is a good book.

One person found this helpful

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flying-monkey

Painful. Necessary. Essential.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 23, 2006

Barefoot in the Head is one of the finest things to emerge from the wreckage of the 1960s.

It is not by any means an easy read, indeed it is far more experimental in forms and style that many more feted non-sf avant-garde works. The prose and poems (some of which individually are really fine pieces of work) and songs and at times simply patterns of letters that compose the work are fragmentary and fractured - the ravings of minds changed beyond recognition by mind-altering psychotropic weapons. Yet somehow it makes sense: the wrong words start to mean something, you start to establish a vocabulary from random or mistaken strings of words and, although how I am not quite sure, you can even get a deep sense of story and character thorugh all the confusion. At times you just have to sit back with a wry smile and know that Aldiss deserves so much more than to be continually ignored by the snobbish mainstream critics: this guy is a British national treasure, and one of the great writers of the late Twentieth Century in English. The degree of sheer literary craft involved in this work is quite remarkable.

This is a book about culture and religion and drugs and technology and war and so much more: as such it stands with Burroughs' Naked Lunch. Dick's A Scanner Darkly and Delaney's Dhalgren as monuments to the ambiguity of the breakdown of both mind and order and dark side of pure freedom. But somehow it is more adventurous and more daring than any of these works.

12 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Patrick Bateman

More abstract than a Picasso painting

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 8, 2019

Verified Purchase

I read some good reviews online and thought I would try out this cult 1960s sci-fi novel. Unfortunately it’s a bit too abstract. The writer goes into streams of consciousness when the main character is off his face, causing confusion. There are also lots of poems between the chapters which provide context to the story and the character’s mindset. It’s hard going but if you persevere I think you will probably find it interesting. Well, different and off the wall more like.

Andreas Zachai

A classic, cheap and good postage

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 23, 2014

Verified Purchase

'nuff said. however seventeen more words are required so, an extrasensory tour-de-force that has stood the test of time and will leave your gaping mind throbbing at the seams.

3 people found this helpful

lauren foster

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 9, 2015

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Delightfully wierd

One person found this helpful

Sue

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 8, 2016