Читать книгу The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy - Brian Aldiss - Страница 4

This trio of volumes was published between 1970 and 1978. Its use of coarse language, masturbation, prostitution and sexual intercourse marks it out as a work appearing after – perhaps, only able to appear after – the famous trial of D. H. Laurence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the 1960’s.

I had tried to deal with some of this tropical material before the Chatterley trial, in a novel I entitled Hunter Leaves the Herd. In this novel, a British soldier in Sumatra is offered a woman and a comfortable life in a kampong in exchange for deserting the army and joining the opposing side, bringing with him rifles and a load of ammunition. A similar event occurred while I was serving in Sumatra. However, I was unable to proceed with the story because it was too full of ‘obscenities’. My soldiers were not permitted to talk as real soldiers talked. I had to shelve the project.

All three Stubbs volumes were well received, although A Rude Awakening appeared rather tardily after the two earlier volumes. Of the volumes, A Rude Awakening is possibly my favourite. The humour is better grounded than in the others. As a writer I had become more experienced.

My closest interests at the time of writing these books included history, particularly contemporary history, as well as the science and science fiction for which I was better known. Later would come Walcot, a large one-volume story of the war against Nazi Germany and what followed.

My life in Sumatra was unlike Stubbs’s. I was given a theatre to manage and to decorate with large cartoon murals. Two sepoys helped me to keep the place clean. I had a charming Chinese lover, and life could hardly have been better. Indeed, when I returned to England and demobilisation I found life to be considerably worse!

Ah, how those of us exiled in the hardships, real or imaginary, of the East felt…

We were stationed in Madras, preparing for an assault on Japanese-held Malaya, when a sergeant came along and said simply, ‘Right, you men. War in Europe’s over. Break off for a smoke…’

All told, then, these three volumes stand as a kind of memorial, both to my writing life and, rather more importantly, to that distressing period when the British Empire was having to close its doors for business.

Brian Aldiss,

Oxford 2012