The Squire Quartet

The Squire Quartet
Brian Aldiss

For the first time ever, all four books in the Squire Quartet collected in one volume.Set during the last years of the Cold War, and spanning the duration of Thatcher’s Britain, The Squire Quartet follows the political, professional and private adventures of a group of linked characters. It is a vivid fictional portrait of Britain’s recent history.All four volumes - Life in the West, Forgotten Life, Remembrance Day and Somewhere East of Life - are collected here for the first time in one volume and for the first time in ebook form.

BRIAN ALDISS

The Squire Quartet

Life in the West

Forgotten Life

Remembrance Day

Somewhere East of Life

Part of the Brian Aldiss Collection

Table of Contents

Cover (#ulink_25d0067b-20bc-52d6-8d6e-ec45e0795167)

Title Page

Introduction

Life in the West

Forgotten Life

Remembrance Day

Somewhere East of Life

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

The Squire Quartet

Originally, these four novels had a curiously remote relationship. Their writing was scattered over fifteen years; I wrote other books in between. I also spent much time putting together anthologies of other writers whose stories I admired and felt they deserved a wider audience.

The scenes are set here and there, concluding mainly in two countries, Georgia and Turkmenistan.

Georgia I had visited, and felt I knew pretty well. At the time, I had a researcher, who dug into the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia. She discovered that Turkmenistan had at its heart the image of a poet, Makhtumkuli. It was as if the column in London's Trafalgar Square had at its summit not Nelson but Philip Larkin!

My curiosity was awakened. I had the good fortune to find in the city of Reading the jovial Dr Youssef Azimun, who had once been Minister for Culture in the Turkmen government. I also found that his wife was a wonderful cook. In no time, I accompanied Youssef to Ashkhabad.

During that period, I was having problems with my literary agent. He worked in London, I in Oxford – thus I had little opportunity to strangle him. This perhaps explains why the four Quartet volumes, in England at least, were published successively by four different publishers. They were for that reason never considered, never weighed up, as a Quartet. Yet they strive together to embrace the world in which we then lived.

It is clear that the four books cover a lot of ground and time and tone; such was my life then that this was partly by design, partly inadvertence.

I did come to regret that Tom Squire did not play a greater role in the later volumes; possibly I felt this to be an echo of my own career.

Eventually, I made what must pass for amends. In a volume I wrote later, which deals with the EU forty years on (entitled 'Super State'), there is a passage where, on a sad and rainy day, Squire's body is buried, his coffin choked with wreaths and flowers. A reception is held afterwards in Pippet Hall.

Squire was a good liberal man. Maybe I underestimated him.

BRIAN ALDISS

Life in the West

Dedication

Life in the West is dedicated to other

Distinguished Persons

Chen, David, Iris, Maysie, and Michael

by no means forgetting Felix, Elena, Derek, and Janet

to show them what one of their number was up to

before we sampled life in the East

and walked the Great Wall together

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Prelude

1 The International Congress

2 Flattery and Higher Foolishness

3 A View from the Beach

4 Conversation with ‘Drina’s’