Keith Roberts- Pavane

Pavane

Orion Publishing

Keith Roberts

1966

“Becky walked to the sea late in the day, trod barefoot among the tumbled blocks of stone that lined the foreshore, smelling the old harsh smell of salt, hearing the water slap and chuckle while from high above came the endless sinister trickling of the cliffs. Into her consciousness stole, maybe for the first time, the sense of loneliness; an oppression born of the gentle miles of summer water, the tall blackness of the headlands, the fingers of the stone ledges pushing out into the sea.” 

A short review today for a novel that didn't leave much of an impression, bar a list of complaints that's going to comprise this post. I was led to Pavane by its cover; the edition I bought is part of Orion Publishing's SF Masterworks imprint, and while I'm a fan of science fiction I'm not a big enough fan to have a wide knowledge of the classics, making me more than happy to trust the good list-compilers at Orion. There were a couple of signs that, and I say this in hindsight, should have tipped me off, not least a back-cover quote full of praise from George R.R. Martin. Nothing personal, I just don't trust Martin's comprehension of good writing, and should've realised the likelihood that Pavane would be of a similar style, which it absolutely was, meaning it was absolutely dull from beginning to end.

Though Roberts was a well-known figure in the then-contemporary world of science fiction, Pavane barely counts as science fiction. It's an alternate history book with an interesting concept that also played a part in me purchasing it; in a short prologue, Roberts travels back to the year 1588 and the assassaination of Queen Elizabeth (the first one, of course) by the Spanish, leading to the eventual conquoring of Britain and its assimilaition into the Catholic church. Roberts' narration then jumps forward four-hundred years to the then-present. Still under the control of the Church, Britain is now a technologically-barren agricultural wasteland that has barely advanced whatsoever under the oppressive Catholic rule.

Lots of covers for this book.

Rather than simply writing one cohesive narrative in this interesting setting, Roberts instead chooses to split his book into six short roughly-connected stories that sort-of tell the story of England's rebellion. Each story focuses on a different character hopelessly slaving away in some muddy field before a grain of hope lights up their pathetic lives. In each tale the author spends plenty of time trying to create an evocative, meaningful psuedo-medieval impression of simple innocent down-trodden farmer folk. None of his characters were even the slightest bit interesting, to me anyway, and his depiction of the repressed societies, attempting to evoke some sort of communal spirit of agricultural county England honestly seemed patronising to me.

My dissatisfaction came almost entirely from Roberts' prose style, which was so drearily boring from beginning to end that the only reason I finished this book was so I can be a snob and tell people I've read it, if need be. I'm definitely a prose snob at this point, having been spoiled by the amazing natural ability of authors like Somerset Maugham, for example, but I like to think I can ignore some failings for the sake of an interesting idea. Roberts' seemed like he had one of those, but it was for naught, because nothing really happens anyway. I can absolutely see the resemblance between this and George R.R. Martin's work, where interesting ideas are suffocated in a mass of dreary, irrelevant boredom by a writer who simply seems to lack any form of natural ability. What he and Martin share is simply an unearned sense of gravitas powered by originally evocative concepts that soon turn out to have very little substance behind them. That's what I get, I suppose, for judging it by its cover.