Barefoot in the Head published in 1969, the very year of Woodstock, widespread dropping of LSD, expanded consciousness and many Westerners becoming followers of Eastern spirituality. Who would have thought nerdy looking British SF author Brian Aldiss, age forty-four, would be a key writer to express the spirit of that trippy 60s Age of Aquarius in novel form?
Barefoot in the Head features the ultimate Acid Head War, a colossal Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for the entire continent of Europe. Also in the mix we have the English language itself floating as if on psychedelics along with all material reality turning as soft, as fluid and as mutable as the lava in one of those 60s lava lamps.
Brian Aldiss frames his tale thusly: we are many years in the future and main character Colin Charteris has taken flight from his job in Italian refugee camps run by the United Nations and is now crossing Europe headed for England in his slick Pontiac Banshee. Colin first hits France which is somewhat stable since the French were neutral during the acid war but when he makes his way to England things flip into a mass magical, mystery tour.
How flipped-out? Tell it like it is, Brian: "When the Acid Head War broke out, undeclared, Kuwait had struck at all the prosperous countries. Britain had been the first nation to suffer the PCA Bomb – the Psycho-Chemical Aerosols that propagated psychotomimetic states.” In other words, like it or not, the country’s entire population is living in a continuous mind-blowing psychedelic hallucination. As readers we can almost hear the lyrics from Eric Burdon's Spill the Wine playing in the background.
As anybody knows who has been under the influence of psychedelics, the intensity of the present moment is so overwhelming, the first thing to disappear is time itself; it's as if all perceptions of past and future are tossed in a fire and go up in smoke. Brian Aldiss captures the essence of the acid experience when he has Colin reflect: "Acid Head victims all over the world had no problems of tedium; their madness precluded it; they were always occupied with terror or joy, which ever their inner promptings led them to; that was why one envied the victims one tried to "save." The victims never grew tired of themselves."
So everybody is tripping out as Colin adventures forth. As not to spoil, I'll shift to highlights, or should I say highs, a reader of Barefoot in the Head can look forward to:
Wild Wordplay - Did I say the English language on psychedelics back there? The more pages one turns, the more Brian Aldiss plays with words and phrases and names - to list several: neologisms, puns, slang, malapropisms. One might even have a sense one is reading that Wake of Joyce: "Some weaker and fainter Bruxellois fell beneath beating feet to be beaujolaised under the press. Cholera had to loot its victims standing at their bursting sweats ransacked to fertilise itself all round the strinkled garmen but bulging eyes not making much extinction in exprulsion between agony and ecstasy of a stockstill stampede sparked the harm beneath the harmony of many perished gaily unaware they burst at the gland and vein and head and vent and died swinging in the choke of its choleric fellation."
Identity - Colin has learned his lesson from Gurdjieff and knows he must cast off his small sense of self in its many forms to be born anew, to be transformed into his larger Self by awakening to true consciousness. As we know now, the year 1969 was but the first wave. Brian Aldiss anticipates many thousands of Westerners taking up the practice of meditation and yoga.
Crash! - Echoes of J.G. Ballard with cars and speed, cars and more speed, cars and crashing and bodies mangled. "The speedometer his thermometer, creeping up and familiar dirty excitement creaming in him. For someone the moment of truth had come big grind the necessary whiteout the shuttling metal death 3-Ding fast before the windscreen and still many marvellous microseconds safety before impact and the rictus of smiling fracture as the latent forces of acceleration actualize."
Poetry - Each of the seven chapters is followed by a batch of poems. Hey, this is 1969 and what is an acid trip without Allen Ginsberg-style reality sandwiches?
Religion and Salvation - Brian Aldiss also catches that Aquarius spirit of the musicals Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. Once you are on the spiritual psychic acid trip throughout Europe, history has a funny way of asserting itself.
Last Hit - Such a unique, one of a kind novel, I'll let Brian Aldiss have the final word. This quote from the first pages: "He saw the wold-Europe, that is, precious, hated Europe that was his stage - purely as a fabrication of time, no matter involved. Matter was an hallucinatory experience; merely a slow-motion perceptual experience of certain time/emotion nodes passing through the brain."
British author Brian Aldiss, 1925-2017
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