he title of The Twinkling of an Eye means a lot. It describes something of Brian Aldiss's physical appearance--the glinting eye, the slightly pixillated sang-froid, the beady bonhomous onrush of the man when he sees a friend (one of thousands) across a crowded room and bellows out the name.
It describes the speed of life, even of a life as crowded as Aldiss's has been.
And--quite deliberately, for it is something evoked in passage after passage--it describes the speed of the century itself, a phenomenon Brian Aldiss is well placed to ratify, being technically an old man (he is 73) who (born in 1925) was nearly an adult by the time World War II came along and ripped the heart of Old England out.
A few years before War broke out, Clough Williams-Ellis (whose own private village, Portmeiris, was the setting for The Prisoner) published an anthology called Britain and the Beast (1937); in it, a clutch of pundits--including John Maynard Keynes and E.M. Forster and the unjustly forgotten U.K. SF writer John Gloag--described with fearful eloquence an England on the brink of losing it: an England about to become a denuded suburbanized philistine hell. Which is of course exactly what happened after the War was won.
As Aldiss says, when a town was destroyed in the Continent, it was rebuilt along rationally modified traditional lines; when a town was rebuilt in England, the heart of it would be given over to multi-story carparks and some of the ugliest chain-stores ever constructed.
Another country entirely
He mentions this as though in passing, but the comment is perfectly timed. The first 200 pages of The Twinkling of an Eye comprise an ornate reverse chronology, spiraling backwards from the embarkation in 1944 of the young Aldiss--on a troopship headed for the Far East (where he served till 1947)--towards his birthplace in Norfolk. By the time we have reached the late 1920s, we are in another country entirely. Brian Aldiss--whose latest SF novel, Somewhere East of Life: Another European Fantasia (1994), radically engages with the appalling near future of Far Eastern Europe--was born and raised in the Land of Ago.
England in 1930 was hierarchical, provincial, conservative, fertile, shadowy, candle-lit, injurious, smug, patriarchal, almost impossibly complex, semi-rural, embedded. It was the England Forster and Gloag et al foresaw the loss of, along with the soil of the green and pleasant land. It was the England which, after 1940, swiftly became a memory. It was the England whose death was a springboard for writers like Aldiss.
The melancholy harshness of so much of his SF and fantasy--from Non-Stop on through The Malacia Tapestry and the Helliconia books and beyond--has a lot to do with the inward melancholy and harshness of his own psychic life, as he makes utterly clear in this quite extraordinary autobiography; but it also represents the viewpoint of someone who has seen the baby and the bathwater flushed through the sewers of our fast filthy century.
The understanding of a man
The corkscrew first half of The Twinkling of an Eye, then, is brilliant; it gives us some way of understanding why a man like Brian Aldiss, after 50 books and a full family life and a full second career as peripatetic man of letters, should still be writing today with the savage urgency that has marked his last decade of work. It is because he is trying to tell us something. I think he has been using the armamentarium of SF--the tropes, the devices, the clever ways of thinking about now in terms of how it is becoming--to tell us that we've lost it: that we've lost the world he was born into, and that we do not know what we have lost.
To an old man today, the young must seem like mayflies in a maelstrom.
After the first half is done, after the lesson has been laid down, The Twinkling of an Eye does begin to run into the rocks as a narrative. The scattershot technique which Aldiss employs from 1947 on does however work to confirm the self-portrait he draws of a man whose exuberant energy (hence the big career) generated a fractured set of lives, because the heartland of the Aldiss self was an unknown region walled by scar tissue he could not penetrate or salve. That unknown region is a territory not unfamiliar to students of the creative worker--it is comprised of childhood traumas, the accumulated guilts earned by a person of excessive sexual energy and intrusive imagination, the refusal of conscience (the mediaeval term agenbite has always seemed to me to constitute a neat body English for conscience) because conscience might unravel too much and turn the victim/perpetrator into little more than a coat on a stick.
Aldiss, therefore, is a classic creative figure, the kind of person afraid to stop because he might find out he's Humpty Dumpty, already fallen.
Miraculously healed
Those who read the book will be glad to know that much of the anguish was traced to its childhood roots, and was miraculously healed, without any loss of creative vigor; and they will be saddened to note that The Twinkling of an Eye, which is full of slightly uneasy but clearly authentic admiration and love for Margaret Aldiss, his second wife, must have been completed just before her sudden death in late 1997.
But (as we hinted) readers of the book may also have a purely literary response to its second half, too: that Aldiss's goal, which was to draw a portrait of himself as an immensely busy but inherently patchwork man, all too thoroughly irradiates the narrative surface of the text. At times, the book too radically detunes into cacophony the days of the man. We know the Aldiss psyche had its quarrels; but we also know that, however destructive of unity they may have seemed to their bearer, they were borne by one man in time, one continuous creature of flesh moving one way only along time's arrow. Sometimes we lose that.
Sometimes we lose the arrow of the man.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all three of which earned Hugo Awards. He is also a co-founder of the Hugo-winning British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list.
