Barefoot In The Head

It's hard to know which Brian Aldiss novel to pick out for a list like this. Should it be Greybeard with its aging population living on a sterilised Earth? Or the Nebula Award winning novella, “The Saliva Tree”, which turns an idea by H.G. Wells into something weird and unsettling? Or the austere, experimental Report on Probability A which brings the French nouveau roman to an infinite regress of voyeurs? We settled on Barefoot in the Head, not one of his most popular works but a novel that fully reveals his engagement with the new wave and the zeitgeist of the 1960s. The novel is a fix-up of his Acid Head War stories, in which Europe has been bombed with long-lasting hallucinogenics and the survivors can barely maintain their grip on reality. The whole story is told in a fragmented prose that consists of broken sentences, oblique allusions, puns and wordplay in the manner of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. The messiah figure who becomes central to the story reflects the underlying new wave idea that religion stems from illusion. Why it's on the list: Every considered trope of the British New Wave is here: the unreliable reality, the fragmented consciousness, the literary experimentation, the incorporation of modernist techniques, the anti-religious bias, the engagement with contemporary culture. In many ways, this is an object lesson in how to write a new wave novel.