Squire Quartet
3 primary works • 4 total works
Book 1
Thomas C Squire, founder of the Society for Popular Aesthetics, one-time secret agent and successful hedonist faces a midlife crisis. That undermines the stability of his ancestral home in Norfolk. Following the creation of his TV documentary series, FRANKENSTEIN AMONG THE ARTS, Squire attends a conference of academics in Sicily. There, against a background of international rivalry, he becomes involved with the lovely if calculating Selina and the Russian Vasily. In counterpoint to the drama of the conference runs the story of Squire's private life: the horrifying circumstances of his father's death; his many affairs with women; and his fifteen-month separation from his wife. This brilliant novel, sometimes violent and always compassionate, moves from England to Sicily, from Singapore to the former Yugoslavia. LIFE IN THE WEST embodies the best characteristics of Brian Aldiss's writing: wit, human understanding, a fine turn of phrase and consummate storytelling.
Book 2
In this notable departure for great science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss, this elegiac examination of family life explores 50 years marked by cross purposes and strained efforts at communication. When Clement Winter's brother dies, he inherits the much-admired yet distant sibling's papers, which turn out to contain poignant accounts of wartime in Sumatra and a series of passionate affairs abandoned and afterwards longed for. Struggling to adjust to the death of his daughter and to the infidelity and fame of his wife - a bestselling fantasy writer- Clement confronts the revelation of his brother's fears and aspirations. As he tries to assimilate and understand his dead brother's life, unexpected upheavals remind Clement how little he understands his own. FORGOTTEN LIFE encompasses comedy and tragedy, joy and grief, as its three main characters try to work out the meaning of their own lives.
Book 3
Four people are killed by an IRA bomb in a Great Yarmouth Hotel in the mid-Eighties. Five years later an American academic sets out to test his theory that their deaths were not random but in some way pre-ordained. As he traces the chains of circumstance that brought together such a disparate group of people - a Russian-born yuppie, an impoverished Norfolk family who missed out on the Eighties boom and a Czech dissident film director - an intriguing and disturbing picture begins to emerge. It was a small bomb in a small hotel, but the conceptual canvas of REMEMBRANCE DAY is a large one. By turns comic and sad, in true Aldiss fashion, and operating on a deceptively domestic scale, its cameos of the nature of disaster reflect global concerns.
Having abandoned Britain to its 1980s recession, architectural historian Roy Burnell operates out of Germany. Moving around the more outrageous parts of the globe, his task is to list architectural gems threatened by war, history and human awfulness. Burnell's mind is also threatened. Someone has stolen a chunk of his memory - ten years, in fact - and the more salacious bits, such as marriage to Stephanie, have been chopped up, recorded, and sold to lovers of soft porn everywhere. Still hoping to recover his missing years, the unfortunate Burnell continues his eventful travels, which take him to long-lost parts of the old Soviet empire. Set not too far in the future, SOMEWHERE EAST OF LIFE is packed with bizarre characters and memorable tableaux - of Hungary, Frankfurt, Georgia, the wastes of Turkmenistan and the depths of Norfolk - in which, in true Aldiss style, tragedy and comedy co-exist cheek-by-jowl.