Pavane (SF) - Keith Roberts ****

The sub-genre of alternate history has always felt an uncomfortable fit with science fiction - but where else are you going to put it? Two of my favourite classics of the genre both posit a modern England where the Reformation didn't happen and the Catholic Church is still a powerful force. I've already reviewed The Alteration by Kingsley Amis, but I've now re-read Keith Roberts' 1968 classic Pavane.

Though usually described as a novel, this is really a linked set of short novellas, featuring an 1960s Britain that follows on from Queen Elizabeth I being assassinated, resulting in a clamping down of Catholicism that also has ended with an iron grip across half the world. The novellas present (mostly) charming snapshots of a rural, low-tech England where steam traction engines pull trains of wagons across the country, long distance communication is largely by semaphore towers and monks work on lithographic printing presses.

Roberts does a wonderful job of giving us the feel, for instance, of operating a steam engine - I used drive miniature steam engines in a park in my teens and all the details are very evocative of the real thing. He endows his bucolic fictional world with what seems at first to be a paean to the joys of pre-industrial life. But in each case the shiny red apple of the story has a worm inside. The opening novella featuring the tractions engines involves a driver whose beloved girl won't marry him, and who has to deal with an attack on his train by robbers. The young semaphore signaller is attacked by a wild cat and appears to be looked after by someone he suspects is a fairy. A monk excellent at artwork is told to document the torture chambers of the inquisition, loses his mind and becomes a figurehead for rebellion. And so on.

The first two novellas for me are the best - as Roberts then weaves more dissent to the Catholics, the cohesion of his world building seems not quite as good. And there are a couple of oddities - why, for

 instance, have all the towns with Roman origins reverted to their Roman names (Londinium for London, for instance, or more obscurely Dunorvaria for Dorchester)? This seems a rather forced way to quickly give a sense of difference, rather than something the Catholic Church would do - it certainly hasn't in countries that remained strongly Catholic.

As the rebellion becomes stronger there's a flavour of mystico-paganism combined slightly oddly with Norse 'old gods', but that crystallises in to an English nationalist revolt against the foreign, heavy-handed power of Rome that has a strange pre-echo of Brexit about it.

One other oddity is cover designs. By far the most visceral of the technical content is those traction engines and the semaphore signal stations, yet neither is shown on the current edition - and on the cover of my 1974 edition, the artist appears not to have read the book at all and included a fairly random set of images that seem to be designed for a totally different fantasy story.

Despite this, though, the pull between modernity (with the background gradual introduction of the likes of internal combustion engines and electricity) and the otherwise nineteenth century technology alongside the pastoral setting is brilliantly managed. This is a book that stays with you a long time after reading it.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here