Читать книгу The Hand-Reared Boy - Brian Aldiss - Страница 4

I was once travelling on a London bus. The young woman sitting opposite me was reading a book. It took me some time to realise it was my novel she had in her dainty hands!

Such occurrences are rare – rare and startling. You are never sure that real people will read your books. On another occasion, I was travelling with my children on a ferry to Gothenburg in Sweden. The boys discovered there was a chap with his girlfriend sitting on the upper deck reading Hothouse. The girl kept talking to him, breaking his concentration. My sons were genuinely cross with her!

This girl on the bus was about to get off the bus. I followed her and tried to strike up what one might call an acquaintance. She would have nothing to do with it. All the same, I realised the connection between real people, the real world, and the books I wrote.

… Later, I met a young woman who preferred masturbation to actual intercourse.

Although I have received many abusive – if not self-abusive – letters from readers, I felt and still feel I had hit upon a popular and real hobby in The Hand-Reared Boy.

Recently an American reader remarked that ‘If God had not wanted us to masturbate, he would have given us shorter arms.’

‘Extremely funny, genuinely erotic,’ was the verdict of the TLS to The Hand-Reared Boy. With that, I tended to rest my case.

The protagonist is key, and the name Horatio Stubbs held resonance for me. Was it quintessentially English? Horatio, fine – as in Horatio Nelson. As for Stubbs, Professor Stubbs was the editor of many old English charters, while one of the painters I most admired was George Stubbs, the 18th-century artist with a preference for painting horses.

Who could be more English than that?

Brian Aldiss,

Oxford 2012