Читать книгу Remembrance Day - Brian Aldiss - Страница 7

This third volume in the Squire Quartet is probably the most complex, and least popular of the four. It may have too many characters in it for a lazy reader. Yet the critics liked it.

The Daily Express described it as, ‘a crisply philosophical novel on the topic of disaster.’

The Daily Telegraph called it, ‘an enjoyable companion piece to Forgotten Life.’

Unlike the earlier novels in the Quartet, in Remembrance Day we meet the rural poor: Ray Tebbutt and his missus, Ruby.

Ruby has a goat she loves, and raspberries she picks. Memories of their childhoods during wartime intrude on their lives. Peace is still troubled; better perhaps to live in a backwater.

They are getting by, living frugally. Ray has acquired a credit card; the card is used only for identification purposes. They never pay for anything with the card in case they fall into debt. But Ray is browbeaten into lending a considerable amount of money on his card, and has problems in getting it back from a more prosperous neighbour.

Both Thomas Squire and Clement Winter, protagonists of the earlier novels, put in appearances. Ruby and Ray Tebbutt live not far from Squire – who is now past his days of fame – in deepest Norfolk. There comes a prolonged supper of rabbit pie, at which the squires and the Tebbutts sit and discuss the current state of play. Squire remarks - giving their current spate of IRA bombing as an example – that when underdogs seize power they rule no more wisely than those they supersede. (Power is also a leading subject in the fourth volume of this series.)

The great going world is buzzing with actions and ideas. The IRA is active in England. Learning and ignorance advance cheek by jowl, as usual.

Eventually, Ray Tebbutt gets his money back. So Ray and Ruby decide to go for a stay in a quiet little hotel called the Dianoya, in Yarmouth.

I once came across a gravestone in a Yarmouth graveyard bearing the name of Embry, and this story ends with an American professor called Hengist Morton Embry – a man who seeks advancement, one way or another. He has prepared a report on a bomb outrage at the Dianoya Hotel where several people have died. He is going to see Professor Stern, the principal of Anglia University. The people killed in the explosion, and their moratoriums, fortify Embry’s theory that misery attracts more misery. He claims it is time for a new understanding of life.

Stern is left alone to think and decide. The TV is on in his room. It is Remembrance Day, with the ceremony at the Cenotaph. He reflects on the endemic wars being commemorated. England is a good peaceful place. But some things need changing …

Brian Aldiss

Oxford, 2012