Close to my home stand two glorious late-Victorian monuments to what the preachers of the age would have called the beauty of holiness. A few minutes’ walk in one direction takes me to St Augustine’s, Kilburn, decorated with exquisite murals and topped by the architect J.L. Pearson’s proudly soaring spire. Another Gothic Revival masterpiece lies a little to the south: G.E. Street’s St Mary Magdalene, Paddington, breathtaking in its command of space and volume, and enriched within by splendid glass and carving.
Built amid London’s squalid slums or ragged suburbs, both Anglican churches remind you that the Anglo-Catholic clerics and artists of their time believed that nothing was too good for the people they aimed to serve. They plundered the high-medieval styles of France, Italy and Germany to plant islands of awe and majesty in the midst of urban grime. The toiling masses needed sacred beauty as much as they needed bread. Indeed, these neo-Gothic visions and missionary Christian Socialism often went hand-in-hand. Such retro grandeur also gave voice in brick and stone to another powerful yearning: a wish that the Protestant Reformation had either never happened, or else had not led to a permanent schism — and that the English church had stayed firmly within the fold of undivided Christendom.
Such Romish nostalgia might now look like a niche interest. But its secular legacy lives on: for instance, in the attraction of a variety of home-grown Europeanism that pines for a profound connection not so much with some suited bureaucracy in Brussels as a continental mainstream of art, thought and culture, without which England will wither into petty provincialism and insularity. Much of the time I share that longing, although I know it has tangled roots. And, surprising as it may seem, an outlier work by the foremost English comic novelist of the later 20th century expresses and dissects it with enormous empathy, mischief and wit. That work is Kingsley Amis’s 1976 novel The Alteration.
Amis was born a century ago, on 16 April 1922. The eclipse of his reputation means that any anniversary jubilations will have been muted at best. According to a now-standard version of his life, the maverick outsider satirist of Lucky Jim subsided fast into grumpily reactionary provocations spiced with heavy-duty boozing, serial adultery and (in his later fiction) spasms of venomous misogyny. Others can draw up the charge-sheet or plead for mitigations. I’m convinced merely that The Alteration — mid-period Amis, written when his decline into blowhard cynicism had supposedly taken hold — deserves to endure. It succeeds not only as a wildly imaginative, vastly entertaining, fictional dystopia, but as an acute exploration of the emotional dynamics behind cultural, political or religious faith. Like complementary panels of some medieval diptych, it merits study alongside Margaret Atwood’s oddly comparable The Handmaid’s Tale — published in 1985. Though I doubt that any university today would twin the pair.
Amis read, admired and analysed science fiction (or speculative fiction, as the buffs prefer). The Alteration bears witness to his long immersion in its formats and protocols. He creates an alternative 1976 in which, four centuries before, the Reformation in Europe had failed. England never split from Rome. The Tudor Prince Arthur did not die but went on to father a dynasty with the Blessed Catherine of Aragon. A revolt by the villainous Prince Henry (“the Abominable”) led to the “Holy Victory” and the entrenchment of Papal power. Luther himself reconciled with Rome and became pope; so, next in line, did Thomas More.
Amis sidesteps the dangers of the dreary “info-dump” — an endemic sin of science fiction — as he scatters teasing morsels of this alternative reality throughout the story rather than bombarding the reader with tedious expositions. When his American editor objected to this piece-by-piece illumination, Amis insisted in a letter that “one direct and complete tip-off instead of hundreds of indirect and partial tip-offs would impose a disastrously simplistic strategy on the book”. He was right: his approach intrigues, and satisfies. As in our world, England and other European nations have colonised much of the globe: Dahnang Station, south of the Thames, commemorates the English seizure of Indo-China from the French in 1815. But Church always trumps State and no power can rival, or question, the overarching authority of the papacy.
However, two important non-papal polities exist. One is the mighty Muslim empire of the Sultan-Calif in Istanbul, antagonist in an endless cold (and sporadic hot) war with Christendom; recently, Islamic forces have reached Brussels before being driven back. Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, expelled Protestant heretics formed the schismatic state of New England. It covers much of the eastern seaboard, but not the American west or south, which are still in European hands. In this Republic of New England, speculative thought and experimental science can flourish. However, the Native Americans who serve the European elite remain inferiors kept down by a doctrine of “separateness” — apartheid, in our world’s terms.
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