Blood of the Lamb

By Paul Gray

THE ALTERATION

by KINGSLEY AMIS

210 pages. Viking. $7.95.

Hubert Anvil, 10, is the best boy soprano in Christendom. But he will be neither a boy nor a soprano much longer--unless an alteration is performed on his anatomy. Church officials, including the Pope, decide that they and Hubert have no choice; such a talent must be preserved for the greater veneration and glory of God. Hubert, a devout and obedient lad, would nonetheless like to know what he will be missing from the manhood that is not to be his. "I know it's glorious to have God's favor," says the potential castrato, "and I'm as grateful for it as I can be, but I caa't prevent myself from wishing it had taken another form."

Kingsley Amis' twelfth novel is set in the now (1976) but hardly the here. Amis has rejiggered the present according to a formula beloved by armchair historians and sore losers: What would have happened if? In the case of The Alteration, the "if is the Reformation: it did not happen. Instead, Martin Luther accepted a compromise with the Roman

Catholic Church and became Pope Germanian I. As a result, the world is essentially Catholic, with the massed forces of the "devilish Turk" held at bay in Constantinople and points south. A lone bastion of Christian heresy remains--the Republic of New England, a broad land stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and peopled chiefly by felons and savages.

Anyone can play this game, but to play it entertainingly requires Amis' sure historical anchor and free-floating imagination. He sets young Hubert's struggle to stay unmutilated against a background of intriguing conjectures and sly jokes. Europe is ruled directly from the Vatican (Pope John XXIV is a stout-swilling Englishman given to reminding his visitors that "we are the Holy Father"). Plague and cholera still ravage its citizens because ecclesiastical authorities have hamstrung medicine and banned science altogether. Jean-Paul Sartre is a French Jesuit. Children read books like St. Lemuel's Travels and "a collection of Father Bond stories." The entire canon of William Shakespeare was proscribed during his lifetime and most of his plays burned as incitements to humanism. Hamlet is now attributed to Thomas Kyd.

Much in this world, as Amis redraws it, seems charming. People still have time for long walks in the unspoiled countryside. The unpolluted air they breathe smells of "tallow-fat, bone-stock, horses and humanity." Because secular art has never been officially sanctioned, Western masters from Blake to De Kooning have left a massive catalogue of inspired religious works. Yet Amis inserts frequent reminders that the price of such beauty and serenity is totalitarianism. A rebellious priest who tries to keep Hubert from the surgeon's knife is brutally murdered.

The incident is jarring because the tone elsewhere is so consistently light and playful. Amis does not want to have it both ways; he wants it every way, and The Alteration flits quirkily between sat ire, science fiction, boys' adventure and travelogue. The result is what Nineteen Eighty-Four might have been like if Lewis Carroll had written it: not a classic, certainly, but an oddity well worth an evening's attention.

Paul Gray

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.