Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day is the Brian Aldiss novel that almost no one buys based on his SF reputation, and it is one of his most accomplished pieces of work. It is a straight literary novel, with no speculative element, that opens with the 1984 IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton (which targeted Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party conference) and then circles outward to follow several people whose lives have been altered by the blast.

Aldiss is doing two things at once. He is writing a kind of group portrait of late-80s Britain (the Thatcher years are in the bones of every chapter) and he is using the bombing as a way of asking how meaning gets assigned to public violence. The answers he reaches are messier and more interesting than the political novels of the decade usually allowed.

The prose is the achievement. Aldiss writes the moment of the bombing with the kind of measured weight you would want, and the long aftermath chapters take time on details that another writer would have skipped.

Four stars. A serious novel that deserves a wider audience than it ever got.