Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day
Brian Aldiss

The third book in the Squire Quartet, available for the first time as an ebook.Russian born Dominic is one of the success stories of the eighties, when yuppies made fortunes on the stock market .Ray Tebbutt is among the unlucky ones. He was involved in a bankruptcy in the mid-eighties .Peter Petrik, a dissident Czech film director, lives in Prague, dreaming of making more films when times improve .The lifelines of these people and others – comic and sad by turns in true Aldiss fashion – converge towards the finality of an IRA bomb epuisode in Great Yarmouth.

Remembrance Day

THE SQUIRE QUARTET

Brian Aldiss, OBE, is a fiction and science fiction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. He was born in Norfolk in 1925. After leaving the army, Aldiss worked as a bookseller, which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). His first published science fiction work was the story ‘Criminal Record’, which appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. Since then he has written nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories, many of which are being reissued as part of The Brian Aldiss Collection.

Several of Aldiss’ books have been adapted for the cinema; his story ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’ was adapted and released as the film AI in 2001. Besides his own writing, Brian has edited numerous anthologies of science fiction and fantasy stories, as well as the magazine SF Horizons.

Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society and in 2000 was given the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Aldiss was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2005. He now lives in Oxford, the city in which his bookselling career began in 1947.

Brian Aldiss

Remembrance Day

Dedication

for

Doris Lessing

a bad terrorist

with love

Contents

Cover (#ulink_b4345008-87a8-51e5-b004-1b341ef640c4)

Remembrance Day

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

1 A Visionary

2 Displaced

3 Despatched

4 Adopted

5 Accepted

6 Salvation

THE SQUIRE QUARTET

Copyright

About the Publisher

Epigraph

Those who constantly recall their history are doomed to repeat it.

Hengist M. Embry

It is difficult to say to what extent a deeper understanding of the mystery of personality would ensure that these tragedies did not arise, since the still deeper problem of destiny itself is involved. We cannot say with any certainty whether it is, in the deeper sense, inevitable that certain persons should meet a certain time, and with certain results. A lifelong study of such mysteries indeed inclines to such belief.

The Nature of Genius

Dallas Kenmare

Introduction

This third volume in the Squire Quartet is probably the most complex, and least popular of the four. It may have too many characters in it for a lazy reader. Yet the critics liked it.

The Daily Express described it as, ‘a crisply philosophical novel on the topic of disaster.’

The Daily Telegraph called it, ‘an enjoyable companion piece to Forgotten Life.’

Unlike the earlier novels in the Quartet, in Remembrance Day we meet the rural poor: Ray Tebbutt and his missus, Ruby.

Ruby has a goat she loves, and raspberries she picks. Memories of their childhoods during wartime intrude on their lives. Peace is still troubled; better perhaps to live in a backwater.

They are getting by, living frugally. Ray has acquired a credit card; the card is used only for identification purposes. They never pay for anything with the card in case they fall into debt. But Ray is browbeaten into lending a considerable amount of money on his card, and has problems in getting it back from a more prosperous neighbour.

Both Thomas Squire and Clement Winter, protagonists of the earlier novels, put in appearances. Ruby and Ray Tebbutt live not far from Squire – who is now past his days of fame – in deepest Norfolk. There comes a prolonged supper of rabbit pie, at which the squires and the Tebbutts sit and discuss the current state of play. Squire remarks - giving their current spate of IRA bombing as an example – that when underdogs seize power they rule no more wisely than those they supersede. (Power is also a leading subject in the fourth volume of this series.)

The great going world is buzzing with actions and ideas. The IRA is active in England. Learning and ignorance advance cheek by jowl, as usual.

Eventually, Ray Tebbutt gets his money back. So Ray and Ruby decide to go for a stay in a quiet little hotel called the Dianoya, in Yarmouth.

I once came across a gravestone in a Yarmouth graveyard bearing the name of Embry, and this story ends with an American professor called Hengist Morton Embry – a man who seeks advancement, one way or another. He has prepared a report on a bomb outrage at the Dianoya Hotel where several people have died. He is going to see Professor Stern, the principal of Anglia University. The people killed in the explosion, and their moratoriums, fortify Embry’s theory that misery attracts more misery. He claims it is time for a new understanding of life.

Stern is left alone to think and decide. The TV is on in his room. It is Remembrance Day, with the ceremony at the Cenotaph. He reflects on the endemic wars being commemorated. England is a good peaceful place. But some things need changing …

Brian Aldiss

Oxford, 2012