The Cretan Teat

The Cretan Teat is one of the strangest and warmest late-period Aldiss novels. It is barely SF (the speculative element is almost incidental) and it is largely a portrait of an aging English writer in retreat on Crete, working through a marriage, a piece of religious history that has been bothering him for decades, and the slow accumulation of years.

Aldiss writes the island with the affection of someone who clearly spent a great deal of time there. The marital chapters are handled with the unvarnished honesty of a writer who has stopped pretending. The religious-history subplot (involving a contested Marian relic) opens out in the back half into the kind of digression-rich novel that the form was once allowed to be.

Four stars. Recommended to readers who like late-period work by writers who have nothing left to prove. Not a book you would expect to find on a science-fiction shelf, and stronger for that.