The Alteration by Kingsley Amis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Brexit Prophesied

If the Protestant Reformation had never occurred, many other unfortunate events might have been avoided: The Thirty Years War In Central Europe, The Glorious Revolution in England, The Jacobite Rebellion in Scotland, dozens of relatively minor but bloody conflicts around the world, and, who knows, perhaps even the French and American Revolutions, and the two World Wars. If the Christian Church had stayed united, then, would the world have been a better place today?

Not bloody likely according to Amis. The world might have been more peaceful but at the cost of systematically oppressive corruption. The Industrial Revolution would have been stifled at the steampunk stage because of clerical bureaucracy. Science would been taught a salutary lesson by Galileo’s defeat and rightly considered an inherently heretical undertaking. Electricity might well be classified as a superstition and suppressed. The teaching of evolution might indeed have merited the death penalty.

And, perhaps most significantly, the Church, by virtue of its role in the endorsement and consecration of the monarchy by divine right, would continue to participate intimately in human governance. In fact the Church would likely have retained its traditional partnership status as the eyes and ears of government in every parish in every civilised land. The populace wouldn’t stand for such pervasive surveillance (and its expense) except as a necessary part of its eternal salvation. The offices of county councils must be modest to demonstrate appropriate official penny-pinching. But cathedrals must of course rise majestically and ornately from exactly the same tax base.

The Alteration of the title is a euphemism for the quaint medieval custom, preferred by popes and princes of the church, of surgery to remove the hormone-producing glands of young boys. The purpose, of course, was godly - the preservation of musical talents given by God to the lad that would otherwise be lost in adolescence. The matter was not considered lightly given the consequences. Removal of the designated organs was certainly irreversible; but the ultimate professional success was not ensured. There was an ample repertoire for the castrati voice; but even within a limited market there was also intense competition. Much to consider and debate therefore.

The European Union was created by the Treaty of Masstricht in 1993, two years before Kingsley Amis died but seventeen years after Alteration was written. The book, therefore, could not have been meant, of course, as an allegory of the return of Christendom by the back door. Surely Amis was not making a pointed political commentary relevant to affairs of the day.

Or could it that he was doing exactly that? Perhaps Amis was sufficiently culturally prescient that he could sense the real impetus behind European integration, namely the restoration of an international spiritual bond through a parallel political force which penetrated deeply into each country? It has occurred to more than one historical commentator that the EU more than resembles a rather better-functioning Holy Roman Empire after all.

And the crucial decision about the hapless English lad - whether or not to have his bits lopped? It would of course be even more far-fetched to suggest that Amis had anticipated the existential agony of Brexit. Except that the real reason for the vote to leave the EU was the feeling of emasculation in the country. The national potency had been eliminated, many felt, by the progressive erosion of sovereignty. The heirs of Englishness were in jeopardy!

Amis hints at the English attitude toward authority, especially ecclesiastical authority, when he gives, the family chaplain’s response to the senior churchman suggesting the boy’s mutilation:

“Lyall felt he could not say which of two things was harder to put up with, the Abbot's conversational style, with its bland coherence and assumption of severely limited cogitative powers in the hearer, or his recurrent look of pleased surprise as each fresh piece of evidence of his wisdom or moral worth turned up, but between them they were likely to implant in certain minds a hardy seed of revolt.”

Exactly, that lingering seed which sprouted into Brexit.

Of course it could all be bollocks, as it were.

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