ie They are NOT coming from overseas !!
The Alteration
- By Kingsley Amis -
ISBN: 9780224013055
Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, Vintage Publishing, London, UK
Published: 1976
Binding: HARDcover with Dustjacket 208 pages
Condition: UNread & displayed condition! HERE in MELBOURNE! A retired display
copy as illustrated!
Edition: FIRST EDITION: 1st printing 1976
TIGHT, SCARCE HARDCOVER ~ IN MELBOURNE ...
WHY do ebayers buy from US?
Because you KNOW what you're getting. My close up photos are of the actual item!!
Remains UNread - it was the display copy instore . It is Tight - neat, no inscriptions or marks within. Appears as in my photos - this is the exact copy!! A nicely preserved copy - superb!
Minimal discernible shelf wear to the green boards or the colourful dustjacket, the interior is tight and spotlessly clean with 208 pages - showing ageing tanning to page edges. THIS copy is the FIRST EDITION: Only printing from 1976 - the UK publishing by Jonathan Cape Ltd, Vintage Publishing, London.
The beautiful dustjacket is designed by Tom Adams copyrighted to Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1976.
REALLY SCARCE title - this is an UNread copy!!
In original green boards HARDcover binding, in publisher's magnificent brightly illustrated dustjacket, price clipped and otherwise as new.
(Stored with 2020!)
Measures approx. 8 x 5¼inches or 20½ x 13½cms
SYNOPSIS ....
The first edition of this alternative history novel by Kingsley Amis.
This novel is set in a parallel universe where the Reformation did not take place.
An award winning novel, with Amis being presented the John W Campbell Memorial Award in 1977.
In Kingsley Amis's virtuoso foray into virtual 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. Art, after all, is worth any sacrifice. 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 equal to 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.
About the Author
Sir Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) was a popular and prolific British novelist, poet, and critic, widely regarded as one of the greatest satirical writers of the twentieth century. Born in suburban South London, the only child of a clerk in the office of the mustard-maker Colman's, he went to the City of London School on the Thames before winning an English scholarship to St. John's College, Oxford, where he began a lifelong friendship with fellow student Philip Larkin. Following service in the British Army's Royal Corps of Signals during World War II, he completed his degree and joined the faculty at the University College of Swansea in Wales. Lucky Jim, his first novel, appeared in 1954 to great acclaim and won a Somerset Maugham Award. Amis spent a year as a visiting fellow in the creative writing department of Princeton University and in 1961 became a fellow at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, but resigned the position two years later, lamenting the incompatibility of writing and teaching ( I found myself fit for nothing much more exacting than playing the gramophone after three supervisions a day ). Ultimately he published twenty-four novels, including science fiction and a James Bond sequel; more than a dozen collections of poetry, short stories, and literary criticism; restaurant reviews and three books about drinking; political pamphlets and a memoir; and more. Amis received the Booker Prize for his novel The Old Devils in 1986 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He had three children, among them the novelist Martin Amis, with his first wife, Hilary Anne Bardwell, from whom he was divorced in 1965. After his second, eighteen-year marriage to the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard ended in 1983, he lived in a London house with his first wife and her third husband. William Gibson is the author of many novels, including Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition. His collected essays and articles have been published under the title Distrust That Particular Flavor.
Sir Kingsley Amis was a popular English novelist, poet, critic and teacher. He wrote in many genres including comedy, science fiction and mystery. He was regarded as one of the finest English comic novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. Amis won many awards during his time, including the Booker Prize, which he was shortlisted for three times before finally winning in 1986
Very Interesting read!
Reviews
Kirkus review … The English Reformation never was. Got that? Now: Ten-year-old Hubert Anvil is boy soprano of the year—1976— and Pope John XXIV (a Yorkshireman) would like that pre-pubescent voice to glorify the Church on a permanent basis. Hence the title, and the castrato-elect's desperate crusade to understand—via peeping-tomming and intense inquiries—what he's in danger of missing out on. As it happens, Hubert would rather compose than sing anyway, so he takes Dickensian flight and refuge in the bosom of a sweetness-and-light household. Escape to sea, an ah!-fate! deus ex machina denouement, and an ironic, downbeat epilogue. The Amis light touch and high spirits are sadly missing. There's no shortage of flat, what-if-history-were-different gags: Arnoldstown (for Benedict) instead of Washington, Monsignor Jean-Paul Sartre, "tachygram" instead of telegram, scientific treatises treated as pornography. But the only real laugh comes when the Pope begins teatime by lifting the teapot and asking, "Shall we be Mother?" The novelty plot and narrative efficiency are enough to snare an audience, but shame on the usually entertaining Amis for giving us gimmicky, half-parodied, sentimental melodrama. Too precious to take seriously (however genuine the anti-clerical anger) and too leaden to embrace.
“Buoyantly inventive from its ground-plan to its remotest pinnacles and twirly bits, Kingsley Amis’s new novel has almost nothing expectable about it, except that it is a study of tyranny.” — John Carey, New Statesman
"One of the best—possibly the best—alternate-worlds novels in existence." —Philip K. Dick
"A masterpiece of its kind.” — William Gibson, The New York Times
“The Green Man and The Alteration will retain their important places in the history of supernatural fiction and science fiction.” — Michael Dirda
“In one of his funniest novels, The Alteration, Kingsley Amis imagined a counterfactual world in which the Reformation had failed. Martin Luther had not plunged northern Europe into religious revolt, but instead became Pope Germanicus I. Prince Arthur of England did not die, so his odious brother Henry never became king. Henry's malcontent Protestant followers, after an abortive rebellion, were banished to New England, where they eventually invented free trade, electricity and personal hygiene. So Europe in the 1960s groaned under a papistical Hapsburg tyranny. Harold Wilson was pope, dispensing tea in the Vatican ('Shall we be mother?'), and papal scouts combed English cathedrals for likely singing boys who, after suitable surgery ('The Alteration'), became castrati in the Sistine Chapel choir.” — Eamon Duffy, Sunday Times (UK)
“Amis, not content with writing scholarly treatments of the subject, produced a historical/futurological novel, The Alteration . . . I might add that the subject of sex in this work is introduced in the most radical and subversive way, though without the smallest hint of the pornographic.” — Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic Monthly
A very, very good read. .... Very clever use of historical figures and cultural references. Those historical and cultural nods do make it a very cynical book. This novel is an attack on organised religion, in this case the Roman Catholic Church. Science is frowned upon and even suppressed in some cases. Even the enlightened practise apartheid and are ethnocentric.
Provocative read! …. What makes The Alteration worth reading is that the author seems intellectually opposed to the kind of traditionalist zeal that rules this book's world, but emotionally aligned with it. His careful and loving descriptions of quince jams, boarding-school discipline, cathedral naves, honor, pomp, hierarchical finery, starch, and galloping horses show that he is mourning the same values that he is mocking. That conflict comes across as weird and fascinating to a regular boring lefty like me. Amis is a spy back from the other side, and he shines a little light on conservative thinking and imagination. At one point a priest defends his toady behavior to another by saying, "[A] man does what he's told, goes where he's sent, answers what he's asked. And, after seeing to that, one is free." That strategy of public masking and loyalty to protect private reality explains all kinds of wide-stance hypocrisy to me.
He does Sci-Fi well … Kingsley Amis does sci-fi well. If you're willing to call this sci-fi, which I'm sure many aren't. But whether you want to call it genre or not, Amis gets into the mood with this book and does what sci-fi, or speculative fiction, is meant: imagines a world very different from own. In this one the Reformation never happened. Luther became pope. England stayed Catholic. And the world is therefore a much more backward place. Science is a dirty word and the rituals and power of the Romish Church are omnipresent. Only America has, with its protestant faith and ideological slavery of the natives, advances technologically to a more recognizable present, since this book is set in the present, just a very different one.
So you can tell this is a pretty vicious attack on the Catholic Church. Waged with an intent and cleverness that Amis is very good at. Can you imagine living in the religiously dominant Middle Ages? It would probably suck. And of course the other thing Amis does is have fun playing with history. The Vatican, much of which is built by a Luther as Pope Germanium I, is austere and empty. Mozart lived and wrote to a fine old age while Beethoven was a short lived phenomenon. You have to be pretty knowledgeable about English history, and architecture, and music, to catch all the references, but you get the sense of it and, as I said, the fun of this kind of book is the creativity and fun the author has in building an alternate time and place.
One also admires Amis's strength here. Whether its attack of the Catholic Church is too much or not, he deeply believes in the prevalence and awfulness of tyranny, and makes one think about its past, present, and potential future. This is not the average sci-fi book. Though different it is the world of 1976, not 2076 Mars. Hubert Anvil is too clever to be a real kid. And the plot lines sometimes bumble into each other. But if you like inventive alternate worlds, this is a book you should read.
Fantastic! … Why no African slavery in the southern part of North America? Without the reformation, many fewer settlers, thus less need for labor? Note the names of the priests in the second to the last part of the book: Maserati (designed car for Mussolini), Satterthwaite (mathematician, theorem for determining statistical significance, inferences, and Berlinguer (leader of Italian communist party); in the other world of the novel, the three discussed with the pope various ways to solve population problem without birth control.
Stunning – awesome writer!! .. I can't believe I never heard of this book before. I always liked Kingsley Amis' novels, but apparently I hadn't read too many of them. Early this week I found it in a bookstore here in São Paulo and I was amazed by the synopsis - and by the William Gibson introduction (you can't go wrong with such a recommendation). So I bought it, naturally.
I read it in three days - and that's because I had work to do, alas. The Alteration is Alternate History of the best kind. Imagine PK Dick's The Man in the High Castle or Keith Roberts' Pavane. Dick, by the way, considered The Alteration "one of the best alternate-worlds novels in existence". The story takes place at the same time it was written, 1976 - a world almost entirely dominated by the Catholic Church, where the point of divergence was the promotion of Martin Luther to pope in the 16th Century. In this world, not much has changes since them, including in technology, where just now cars and planes are starting to appear - and electricity, though well-known, isn't used and is considered a luxury, or something from a TR, or Time Romance (the Science Fiction of this universe). A special treat for the reader (no spoilers here, I promise) is the alternate novels Amis invents for our delight. The reader will recognize many authors that exist here but will see many of his novels that they never wrote in our world.
The prose is also admirable, and the plot is convolute as it should, regarding a subject so delicate as the life of a young singer whose life is to be altered (in more than one way) forever by the will of the Church. This is not a book to be missed.
Marvellous Reading!
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