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Greybeard

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Greybeard

By: Brian Aldiss
Narrated by: Saul Reichlin
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About this listen

Ecological disaster has left the English countryside a wasteland. Humanity faces extinction, unless Greybeard and his wife, Martha, are successful in their quest for the scarcest and most precious of resources: human children.

©2011 The Executors of the Estate of Brian Aldiss (P)2019 Audible, Ltd Science Fiction Fiction

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Elegiac pastorale about ageing from the late sci-fi legend, Brian Aldiss. Depicting a world in which no more children are born, Greybeard finds a senescent mankind winding down in an shuffle of creaking joints and disappointment. Neither as harrowing as Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road' nor as powerful as Nevil Shute's 'On The Beach', Greybeard's key strength lies in Aldiss' evocative description of a mythic English landscape returning to the wild (something the cover art misjudges entirely). The ending, seeded from the start, is clever and adds to the layer of pagan folk strangeness that runs throughout the novel. Driven by sentimentality, despair, anger and resignation, this is also a profoundly divided book, split between past and present, the old and the new. Unfortunately, most of the flashback sequences are turgid and old-fashioned, diminishing the story's impact. Cormac McCarthy astutely avoided offering an explanation for his novel's catastrophe and Greybeard would have been a much better work had Aldiss done the same.
Generally, Saul Reichlin's narration is very good, his weathered tone appropriate to the story, but, occasionally, he is too ponderous and makes some of Aldiss' already fusty dialogue sound positively antique.

Humanity's Gonads Were Irrepairably Damaged

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I purchased this apparently well-regarded audiobook having enormously enjoyed Aldiss's Hothouse and wanting more by the same author. Back in the 1960s when I became a SciFi fan, Aldiss's short stories were always interesting and thought-provoking, and in my mind I ranked him close behind Asimov and Arthur C Clarke.

This book was an enormous disappointment. Having started well, the story descended into an unimaginative plod, and several flashbacks were positively tedious. I returned the book to Audible with about a third of it unread.

The narrator too was poor in my estimation, seeming to struggle to say more than one or two words without taking a breath. All in all a very unsatisfactory experience.

Disappointing

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