Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

There's a Pigeon in the Hole
Phlogiston Forty-Five, 1996
Categories can be useful, particularly when you are trying to find a specific book buried somewhere
inside an enormous bookshop. Doubtless the shop will have an SF section (and they'll probably call it Sci-
Fi, but we lost that battle many years ago). Maybe there will be a detective novel section, a history
section, a humour section -- all there to aid you in your quest for the perfect book that presses all your
buttons. However, convenient though this system is, I'm not sure that I fully approve of it. For one thing
it blinds you to those authors whose works appear in more than one of the categories. There are more
of these than you might at first think.
It was the recent death of Sir Kingsley Amis that got me musing along these lines. He was always one of
my literary heroes. In common with everybody else I read Lucky Jim and marvelled at the subversive
humour of it. Amis was one of the "angry young men" of the 1950s. A label he detested. The book still
reads well today, although it no longer seems quite as subversive as once it did. The fashionable angers
of the time have become more commonplace concerns or have disappeared entirely.
There are occasional references to science fiction in the book and I remember picking these out with
glee when I first read it (Jim, as I recall, makes "Martian faces" in his mirror, for example). I also
remember being quite delighted by a scatological joke in another early Amis novel. I think it was One Fat
Englishman. The hero is out gallivanting with a scrumptious Portuguese girl whom he fancies like crazy.
However he isn't getting very far since he speaks no Portuguese and she speaks no English. During the
course of this monoglot semi-seduction he feels an enormous fart building up. Part of his mind refuses
to worry about it -- after all, if he farts he'll be doing it in English and she won't understand!
Anyway, I was not at all surprised to find that Amis was a science fiction fan. He went on to publish one
of the first critical works on the genre (New Maps of Hell) and in the 1960s, in collaboration with
Robert Conquest he edited the Spectrum anthologies. These were quite powerful and influential
anthologies (at least in Britain), somewhat on a par with the Best SF series edited by the
pseudonymous Edmund Crispin (his real name was Bruce Montgomery and, interestingly, he was a good
friend of Amis') and they did a lot to popularise the field in Britain where the SF magazines in which the
stories were first published were very difficult to come across. Somehow it seems quite appropriate that
the two most original and interesting science fiction anthologies of the British post-war era were both
edited by people from outside the science fiction world.
Amis even wrote several science fiction novels, although they were seldom recognised as such by the
literati. But however you define science fiction there is no doubt that The Alteration and Russian Hide
and Seek are firmly inside the borders. I could even put together a good case for The Green Man
(where God has a small, walk-on part), and The Anti-Death League, though I am willing to admit that
the evidence is not quite as strong here.
The point, of course, is that Amis was a writer who recognised that categories existed, but who refused
to let himself be bound by them. If he had an idea for a book he simply wrote the book without worrying
too much about which shelf it might eventually be filed on. Many of his works are simply novels -- you
and I might refer to them as "mainstream". But equally as many belong to one of the genre fictions if
you care to make that distinction.
Some critics would consider all of his books to be simply the work of a member of the literary
establishment and would look no further. When you gain a certain literary reputation, smaller sins like
science fiction novels tend to be recognised but dismissed as irrelevant. This is far too narrow and
parochial a judgement and Amis himself would have hated it. In Memoirs, his delightfully bitchy
collection of autobiographical essays, he makes his feelings on this topic abundantly plain. Amis was
above all that sort of thing (or below it, depending on your point of view). He was fully aware of the
genre novels and of their place in the world, and he knew exactly how and why they generated the
passions that they do. In an essay published in the collection What Became of Jane Austen? and
other Questions he wrote: