Affairs at Hampden Ferrers by Brian Aldiss (Little, Brown, £16.99).
Subtitled An English Romance, the action takes place in "an absolutely average village".
Aldiss remains most famous for such science fiction classics as Helliconia and Hothouse, and here he seems sometimes to describe rural Oxfordshire in as much detail as an unknown and alien world.
The self-consciously mundane opening soon veers into magic realism, and then into ecclesiastical horror which resembles MR James by way of HP Lovecraft.
The mixture is not a happy one.
While perhaps intended to demonstrate that there's no answer to the question of reality, or maybe that "life is like opera, there's something magnificent about everything that happens", it seems more like indecision by Aldiss as to what sort of novel he is writing.
This is not a bad book: from a writer of Aldiss' undoubted gifts such a thing would be unlikely.
It is, however, a confused book, and not one which demands to be read.
Alex Sarll
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