Pavane

Author: Keith Roberts

Pavane is a sequence of linked stories set in the 1960s in a world in which the Spanish Armada had succeeded, Catholicism had defeated Protestantism, and the Church ruled Britain in a way that limited all technology. Although there are signs of modern life, such as road trains and semaphore signal stations that criss-cross the country, there is still a form of feudalism in place. The different stories each provide a vignette of ordinary life that together build up into a powerful and impressive portrait of the world.A young man operating a road train is cheated by his best friend, who attempts highway robbery. A signalman at a remote station is injured and as he lies dying is visited by a fairy (who did not flit from Britain with the coming of Protestantism). A monk who witnesses the tortures of the Inquisition starts to tour the country as an itinerant preacher recounting visions that seem to bear a resemblance to our own world. A young woman from a depressed and blackened town, sees a white boat that she imagines will be her passport to a better life, but it turns out to be smuggling forbidden technology and she ends up betraying it to the authorities. A woman related to the family who run the road train in the first story marries into the aristocracy, but discontent at the rule of the Church grows and she ends up leading a rebellion that may be doomed to failure. Keith Roberts was one of the finest writers ever to produce science fiction in Britain, his work is moving and vivid, with a wonderful evocation of landscape and a detailed knowledge of small, everyday technologies. All of which comes out in what many consider to be his best work and which the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction rates as the finest of all alternate histories.

Similar Recommendations

Roberts was a brilliant writer who was at his best in linked stories that built into a novel and that worked as a kind of mosaic.

The Chalk Giants is another mosaic novel, more ambitious in scope though some would say less successful in detail than Pavane. It starts with a sad, lonely, failure of a man fleeing an unspecified catastrophe. Depending on how you choose to read it, he either succeeds in escaping to a refuge in southwest England, or is overtaken by the disaster and the rest of the novel is his dying vision. From this present, the novel shifts future history, pausing at the diseased and mutated victims of nuclear war, at a primitive community, at something equivalent to the dark ages, and at the arrival of an analogue of Christianity. The various components of the novel varyn in quality, but at their finest, such as the immediate post-apocalyptic "Monkey and Pru and Sal", they are easily among the best work of his career.

Alternative Choice
Roberts always worried about the way he had made the Church the villain of Pavane, and his later mosaic novel, Kiteworld, can be seen as a response to that. It is set in a post-catastrophe world in which watchmen on the borders are hoisted aloft on giant kites to watch for signs of "demons". The details of day to day life in a world that is slowly running down is what makes this such an effective novel. One of the constituent stories, "Kitemaster", won the BSFA Award.

Alternative Choice
One of the few novels he wrote, as opposed to collections of linked stories, was GrÃ?Â¡inne, which is largely autobiographical in detail, recounting his life in art school (Roberts was a very talented illustrator) and in advertising. But alongside this conventional, realist story there are persistent encounters with the titular femme fatale who leads the book eventually into a curious technological future. GrÃ?Â¡inne won the BSFA Award.