Brian W Aldiss - Barefoot in the Head

Barefoot in the Head by Brian W. Aldiss

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Many of the objectives of New Wave were laudable. Some of the outcomes didn't work. Although Aldiss was producing fiction some years before New Wave SF - in the form of Michael Moorcock's New Worlds - some of his output was recognisably New Wave-ish, and in particular, Barefoot in the Head, appeared as extracts in that publication.
It was fragmented, it was brave, it didn't work. However it's work dwelling on the failures of that movement. A key problem was that experimentation with broken narratives and destructured syntax was all very well in a literary journal but despite its aspirations, New Worlds wasn't that. The methods of producing plausible, readable, well structured narratives have been understood for hundreds of years. It was the absence of that that, in the face of the genre's ghettoisation, prompted self-help initiatives such as the Milford Group and the New Wave movement. Those issues weren't fixed with New Wave, in fact they were often made worse. New Worlds, for example, puttered around, sometimes shocking, other times dabbling on the edges of self-indulgent irrelevance, in its attempt to find its niche. Barefoot in the Head exemplifies the characteristics of that journal. It was an unsatisfying excursion that disappoints in key areas but can be appreciated as an experiment in narrative form.



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