Greybeard

Introduction

Greybeard is a novel about growing old, and about being old. Its every page is pregnant with the truth of that condition — that ageing is a ceaseless, decaying passage towards the impossible asymptote of our own death. But the fact that he is writing science fiction enables Aldiss to focus this human universal (it is hard, in fact, to think of a more universal human theme) with extraordinary clarity. For in his imagined world a nuclear accident has rendered humanity sterile: the old get older, but there are no more births, and no new generation rises behind them to fill their place. It is a bleakly brilliant conceit, and Aldiss works through its implication with a superbly restrained, almost Hardyesque rigour. In part this has to do with some beautifully observed, and beautifully handled, nature writing, the continuing fecundity of some (though not all) the wildlife contrasting bittersweetly with the sterile decay of humanity:

Aldiss has never written better, or more evocatively lyrical, than this. It creates a sense of the world as rounded, finely observed, pregnant with myriad beauties.

Greybeard is a potent elegy for the human condition. Like a later masterpiece Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Greybeard understands that humans do not endure through the grimmest times alone. Greybeard depends upon his wife Martha to give him purpose, and reason for living; and he is himself aware that being a fairly unimaginative chap is an advantage, since it prevents him from a capsizing comprehension of the approaching and inevitable end. But unlike the powerful but rather bludgeoning bleakness of McCarthy’s novel, Aldiss’ is shot through at all points with a weird, plangent beauty.

It will also remind the reader of P. D. James’ derivative Children of Men, a book that committed nothing short of larceny upon Aldiss’ (much better) novel and then failed to make anything much of its swag. James’ take gets bogged down in religious allegory and political hi-jinks, forcing an artificial climax with some daft gunplay. The film adapted from this book — a much better work with very little in common with its source text — likewise pulled its key punch. In both cases there was a sense that a world in which parturition had come to an end could only be made comprehensible through hope: a pregnant woman, a new child, the dawn coming round again.

Aldiss is clearer-eyed. He tropes his existential theme as anticlimax, a figure that shapes many of the novel’s set-pieces. Greybeard himself works as a contemporary historian, recording events for a future in which there will be literally nobody to read. Martha is kidnapped by a sex-maniac, chloroformed and tied up in a bedroom; but she is not raped. The novel’s characters travel in the hope of reaching the sea, but we never get there. Even the novel’s grand premise — that there are no more children — is eventually revealed as off-the-point.

Not to be pretentious (and in fact this novel is one of the most grounded, least pretentious ever written) but the resonance of Greybeard derives from the mellow skill with which it explores a crucial existential dilemma. We will all die. Some of us console ourselves with the thought that we will live again after our death, in a heaven perhaps, or reborn as humans in this world. Such fantasies are widespread, and for good reason, but they lack the heft of reality — they are, in the strictest sense, escapist, as if death were only a prison from which the obedient or the wily might break through. In our bones we understand the blanker truth: there is no escape from death. So we turn instead to another consolation; we die, but our children will carry on, and our DNA will wriggle its threadworm way through other organisms. There is some relief in this thought, and from a longe durée perspective it’s kind of the point of our being here — humans are only one of the many ingenious methods DNA has lighted upon to make more DNA. But it would be a strangely aloof human being who could take personal satisfaction in that fact.

This is the genius of Aldiss’ treatment. The discovery that children are still being born in the world is treated not as a flame of hope or redemptive twist, but — with brilliantly pitched anticlimax — as something largely irrelevant to the passing generation, a sort of knight’s move. Greybeard and his wife are still on the way to death. Greybeard, fundamentally, is about seeing the world unencumbered either by fantasies of individual or species survival. That such a view is not merely depressing says something about Aldiss’ enormous skill as a writer, but also — perhaps — it suggests that an existence beyond hope might be beyond fear as well. The theme is not in escape, but only in the fortitude with which we encounter the inevitable. That is the strength given to mortals, after all.

Given that it comes to many of us, and that most of us strenuously hope to reach it, it’s perhaps surprising how few great novels there are that actually confront the realities of old age. Most — like Cervantes’ seminal Don Quixote — are in fact fantasies of escape from decrepitude. Others, like Muriel Sparks’ Memento Mori, explore the consolations of mortality. But Aldiss’ novel takes a difference approach to either of these works. Greybeard is varied, beautifully observed and written, involving and profound without ever falling for the twin, related mendacities of ‘consolation’ and ‘escapism’. It has a good claim to being Aldiss’ most fully realised novel.

Adam Roberts