A well-off middle-class house stands on a certain unnamed British (?) street. In the house live a couple known as Mr. and Mrs. Mary. Mr. Mary appears to be a writer of some sort, Mrs. Mary a stay-at-home wife. A plump woman named Violet is their housekeeper but does not live on the premises, coming and going each day. Across the wide street of crumbling macadam is a café, G.F. Watt's. The grounds connected with the house features three outbuildings. In each of the outbuildings is a covert observer.

A small garden bungalow holds the man known as G, the ex-gardener. His bungalow has two windows. He sits in front of the windows and watches the house. A black-and-white cat is a visitor. He feeds it milk. While shaking out his carpets one day, he has a nervous conversation full of non-sequiturs with Mrs. Mary, who is off on an errand.

Some distance further away from the main house is an old coach-house. In the loft of this building lives S, the ex-secretary to Mr. Mary. S needs a telescope to keep the house under observation. He is frequently misplacing it. A sympathetic Violet brings him some pilfered items from the house.

Closest to the house, almost in contact, is the garage. Here in a leaky loft lives C, the quondam chauffeur. C is so close to the house that he needs to employ a homemade periscope for his spying duties. That is, when he is not busy sitting in a derelict car and imagining driving Mrs. Mary around. C receives a slice of cake from Violet.

All three men pay a visit to the café. All three men are fixated on their copies of the same painting, The Hireling Shepherd, by W. Holman Hunt.

Interspersed with the minute accounts of the quotidian activities of these observers are passages relating how they in turn are being watched by extradimensional entities, in a never-ending Ouroboros chain of viewers that seems ultimately to include both Mrs. Mary and the bucolic inhabitants of the Hunt painting.

More than just a novel—an anti-novel

I first read this book at age 14, upon its release in the United States in the form of a Lancer paperback, part of that publisher's regular SF line, which included such more conventional fare as Hal Clement's Needle (1950) and Jack Vance's The Dying Earth (1950). (The tale had previously been serialized in Moorcock's New Worlds, a fact unreported by Lancer that might have given me some hint as to its experimental nature.) The packagers of this edition certainly did their best to make the book seem like traditional SF, blasting the phrase "astonishing science fiction!" across the front cover and concocting an alluring synopsis of the plotless plot for the back cover.

But just a page or three into the book, and even my relatively untutored sensibilities knew I had stumbled across a narrative whose likes I had never before encountered. I was baffled, entranced and admiring. The richness of the banal surface narrative, underpinned by erotic enigmas, was potent and unduplicated by any other fiction, even by Aldiss, that I had previously read. The affect and effects of this novel stayed with me, and decades later I would try to duplicate some of the same sensations in my own novel A Mouthful of Tongues.

Over the intervening years, as I gained a wider sense of literary history, the book's provenance and antecedants became clearer. In the same New Wave spirit that saw John Brunner utilizing the techniques of Dos Passos, Aldiss had been intent on importing European avant-garde innovations into SF.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a movement in France known as the "antinovel" or nouveau roman movement came to the fore. Perhaps its main practitioner was Alain Robbe-Grillet, with such books as The Erasers (1953). Surely the most notable manifestation of this approach, at least as far as the general public was concerned—an approach that relied, in the words of the author of an encyclopedia entry on Robbe-Grillet, on "methodical, geometric, and often repetitive descriptions of objects [to] replace the psychology and interiority of the character"—was the perplexing 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad, scripted by Robbe-Grillet.

So, armed with an intimate knowledge of this new mode of storytelling, Aldiss set out to graft several SF notions to his own such tale. The primary concept at work here is that of Heisenbergian interference by the observer with reality. This is made explicit toward the end, when one observer, Domoladossa, ponders how his actions might be dictating the course of the very report he's reading. Another SF conceit at work here, I think, is the concept of pocket universes. The world of "Probability A" feels as though it extends no further than the isolated town of Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life." Aldiss is also concerned with presenting a kind of Gnostic view of levels of reality, some being shabbier than others, imperfect subcreations. Finally, he creates an objective correlative to Einstein's notion of no fixed universal frame of reference. All is relative.

Aldiss' brilliant deadpan and droll prose, with its unwavering repetitiveness-with-variation, manages to blanket the reader in a hypnotic state. The characters, ostensibly ciphers, begin to take on a tender humanity. Their pocket universe comes to stand for our own stuck-in-a-rut daily routines. G, S and C are us, fixated on the godlings known as Mr. and Mrs. Mary and oblivious to the larger universe around us.