Читать книгу The Squire Quartet - Brian Aldiss - Страница 4

Originally, these four novels had a curiously remote relationship. Their writing was scattered over fifteen years; I wrote other books in between. I also spent much time putting together anthologies of other writers whose stories I admired and felt they deserved a wider audience.

The scenes are set here and there, concluding mainly in two countries, Georgia and Turkmenistan.

Georgia I had visited, and felt I knew pretty well. At the time, I had a researcher, who dug into the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia. She discovered that Turkmenistan had at its heart the image of a poet, Makhtumkuli. It was as if the column in London's Trafalgar Square had at its summit not Nelson but Philip Larkin!

My curiosity was awakened. I had the good fortune to find in the city of Reading the jovial Dr Youssef Azimun, who had once been Minister for Culture in the Turkmen government. I also found that his wife was a wonderful cook. In no time, I accompanied Youssef to Ashkhabad.

During that period, I was having problems with my literary agent. He worked in London, I in Oxford – thus I had little opportunity to strangle him. This perhaps explains why the four Quartet volumes, in England at least, were published successively by four different publishers. They were for that reason never considered, never weighed up, as a Quartet. Yet they strive together to embrace the world in which we then lived.

It is clear that the four books cover a lot of ground and time and tone; such was my life then that this was partly by design, partly inadvertence.

I did come to regret that Tom Squire did not play a greater role in the later volumes; possibly I felt this to be an echo of my own career.

Eventually, I made what must pass for amends. In a volume I wrote later, which deals with the EU forty years on (entitled 'Super State'), there is a passage where, on a sad and rainy day, Squire's body is buried, his coffin choked with wreaths and flowers. A reception is held afterwards in Pippet Hall.

Squire was a good liberal man. Maybe I underestimated him.