Humanity's Gonads Were Irrepairably Damaged

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.

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