Barefoot in the Head

by Brian W. Aldiss

A new savior emerges from a drugged-out dystopia in “the most ambitious psychedelic sci-fi novel of the era” from the Science Fiction Grand Master (Conceptual Fiction). The earth is recovering from the Acid Head War, in which hallucinogenic chemicals were the primary weapon. Many humans are now suffering from delusions and are unable to tell the real from the imaginary. When a man named Colin Charteris tries to make sense of the drugged-out world, he is taken as the new messiah. As he descends into paranoid visions, he begins to believe this himself.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Novels, Post Apocalyptic, Speculative Fiction, Literature

293 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 1969

About the author

Pseudonyms: Jael Cracken, Peter Pica, John Runciman, C.C. Shackleton, Arch Mendicant, & "Doc" Peristyle.

Brian Wilson Aldiss was one of the most important voices in science fiction writing today. He wrote his first novel while working as a bookseller in Oxford. Shortly afterwards he wrote his first work of science fiction and soon gained international recognition. Adored for his innovative literary techniques, evocative plots and irresistible characters, he became a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 1999.
Brian Aldiss died on August 19, 2017, just after celebrating his 92nd birthday with his family and closest friends.

Brian W. Aldiss Group on Good Reads

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

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 world-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-

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Girl at the Inn

The city was open to the nomad
The fountain sparkled for his lips

But at the inn the girl who served there
Had nothing to spare a traveller

The traveller settled at the inn
Although he left his bill unpaid

The girl no longer held him strange
One day she let him clasp her lightly

And then that night he clasped her tightly
Now she lets him clasp her nightly
Wrongly rightly clasp her nightly

The traveller sang
He loved the girl
And was captive of the city

This was their tiny personal story
Like perhaps to many others

Or why else should he say the curious thing
When smiling to her smiles one day

Although I love you dearly love
There's nothing personal in it

And then that night he clasped her tightly
Still she lets him clasp her nightly
Wrongly rightly clasp her nightly

[notgettingenough · Rating 4 out of 5]

Presumably the title Barefoot in the Head is a reference to Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park - the movie of the play came out in 1967, two years before Aldiss's book was published - but when I look them up online, I don't see anybody commenting along those lines. Am I wrong on that?

I get the impression, glancing at thoughts over the decades about this book, that it is (perhaps reluctantly) placed in a failed but brave sub-genre of attempts to (a) write about the drug culture of the day and (b) to tackle science fiction with a James Joycean approach to language. It is certainly true that if you aren't prepared to read this at a word level, you are going to miss out on the richness and the fun of the book. Since there is also a sense in commentary about Barefoot in the Head, that 'people don't talk like that', 'it wouldn't happen,' this makes me note that I think that's far from true.

My departure point for that observation is my mother's experiences of high delirium over the year or so. To set the scene, she is tiny, 84, with dementia. When in the delirious state she spouts forth a non-stop stream of consciousness in an oratorical fashion with an astonishing command of language. She combines unique ways of describing things she no longer has the right words for, with quotes interweaving, both poetry and drama, and she makes up wonderful words which would have done JJ proud. She can go on like that for long periods at a time. Sometimes it feels like a performance, like I am truly watching somebody on a stage. Other times it is like she is trying to communicate, but it's in a language none of the rest of us can speak. Watching her in this state fills me with awe and moves me deeply. I see it as part of her, a release of part of her, and by no means an aberration.

Extending that to the easy to believe scenario that a drug induced state (via chemical warfare, why not?) affects a whole population and the premise of this book is not the least surprising. It's no less credible than any other dystopian setting, maybe more so than most.

The only other thing I want to mention is that Aldiss's attempt to describe the multi-verse from the viewpoint of the subject - the chief protagonist sees, or believes he sees, other selves splitting away - is another achievement of the book. His struggles with this, watching versions of himself pass on, wondering what this means he himself is, are somewhere between poignant and harrowing.

Bottom line: not easy to read if you aren't willing to take the trip. I have no idea how many stars to give it. Let's say four is for bravery and imagination.

Postscript 28/12/22: I read an essay by Helen Garner a while back in which she makes exactly the same observations of her mother as I do of mine. Evidently it's an ordinary ability we all have, to dive into new languages which we make up as we go along. Being so far a strictly mono-lingual person, I look forward to the experience should it come.

[Olethros · Rating 3 out of 5]

-Muchas rutas llevan a Interzona. Algunos se pierden por el camino-.

Género. Ciencia-Ficción.

Lo que nos cuenta. En el futuro, los habitantes de Europa viven bajo los efectos alucinógenos de las bombas de aerosol psicomimético arrojadas durante la última guerra. El protagonista, oriundo de los Balcanes (zona menos afectada por el efecto lisérgico que otras regiones, o eso cree él), sigue sus anhelos de juventud (¿o ha sido destinado por la Organización de las Naciones Unidas Renovadas?) y viaja hacia Inglaterra, donde los bombardeos fueron especialmente intensos.

¿Quiere saber más del libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

[Austin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been curious about this book ever since I read a review of the 1990 Thurston Moore/Borbetomagus record that named itself after Aldiss's work (Thomas Pynchon wrote the liner notes to that thing). Anyhow, I guess I "enjoyed" this book, though really Barefoot in the Head is such an experimental work that I found myself more admiring its ambitions than gushing over its underdeveloped achievements. It's basically a psychedelic relic from 1969, a supposed sci-fi meisterwerk bathed in some of the nascent new-age woo going around at the time (references to Gurdjieff and Ouspenky abound) in which most of Europe finds itself literally tripping out constantly due to warfare between countries being fought with psychedelic drugs sprayed into the air. In other words, it takes place in the aftermath of an Acid War, and the protagonist, Charteris, begins the book sober and serious, unwounded by LSD, on a mission to drive across Europe toward Scotland. After about 45 pages, he somehow gets some LSD in his system, and the reader begins to notice the prose changing little by little until finally syntax, meaning, spelling, the mechanics of language itself dissolve into formlessness, perspective shifts and non-sequitirs (the narrator apparently got dosed too). There are many pages in the book where the narrative crumbles into bits of experimental poetry, doggerel, and even random letters strewn about the page. Charteris becomes some sort of messiah figure to a bunch of fellow young acidheads, and they follow him around Europe in a fleet of cars, getting into fights, fires, and trouble....or so I gather. So much of the latter half of the book is Joycean-coded and somewhat Ergodic in nature (i.e. it's essentially a nexus of intentional wordplay disguising references to....uh, things I haven't read about yet), meant primarily to mimic the effects of a psychedelic experience, that it becomes more than a little incomprehensible. If you're stoned yourself, you may like this a lot. I'm so past my pot-smoking days that I got severe headaches from reading a lot of it. Still - for being intensely daring in its breaking of boundaries between narrative and meaninglessness, I have to give Barefoot in the Head major props.

[Benjamin Ettinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man lives his life in sleep, and in sleep he dies. -Gurdjieff

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was a mystic who, after spending several years travelling throughout Asia during his early adulthood in the years before W.W. I, developed a syncretic spiritual doctrine combining Buddhism, Sufism, and Hinduism. Gurdjieff sought to awaken people's inner consciousness, teaching that, as people became disconnected from the truth of ancient teachings, they became more and more like automatons, rendering them susceptible to control from outside forces, leading to episodes of mass psychosis like war.

Gurdjieff's most famous disciple was Peter D. Ouspensky, who promulgated a practical Fourth Way for use by laymen in everyday life, "where a person learns to work in harmony with his physical body, emotions and mind". The Gurdjieffians presaged esoterics who would help usher in the spiritual revolution of the 1960s, including pseudoscience figures like Wilhelm Reich with his orgone accumulators and cloudbusters, and spiritual gurus like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Osho.

The notion of following teachers of alternative ways grew into other areas. Amidst the revolution in social norms and confluence of countercultural currents in the 1960s, charismatic bands like The Beatles and The Doors emerged and amassed literal "cult followings", both influenced by this social awakening and in turn contributing to its trippy drug-induced haze of youthful rebellious nonconformity.

This rejection of the conformist and materialist values of modern life all crystallized at the mass human be-in that was the Summer of Love of 1967 in "Hashbury", SF. It was here that Timothy Leary coined the phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out". Mind-altering drugs became commonplace. Ken Kesey took an acid-fueled bus "trip" across the country and held electric Kool-Aid acid tests for the public to experience the effects of psychedelics. 50 years later, ketamine, ecstasy, and psilocybin are now FDA-approved as drugs for the treatment of various diseases from anxiety to PTSD. Could the counterculture have been right?

British sci-fi maestro Brian Aldiss distilled all of these tendencies in 1969 in the highly experimental and eye-crossingly difficult but brilliant BAREFOOT IN THE HEAD, which, on this its semicentennial, strikes me as one of the most remarkable and overlooked tales of the era.

Appalling shawls of illusion draped across the people where the grey mattered

The setup is a classic what-if scenario: What if the whole world did like the counterculture suggests, and dosed acid -- a global acid trip. Would it save or destroy the world? At a deeper level, what would it take to save the world from itself? Can it be saved? Is it worth saving? These are questions that remain just as relevant today, on the eve of a man-made ecological apocalypse. The details may be different, but the parable remains apposite.

Europe is bombed with aerosolized psychedelic drugs, sending the whole of the old world into a massive trip. The protagonist is on a journey north from France, and as the acid sets in, he begins to lose his grip on reality and to rant about the visions of alternate realities that appear before him. What began as a legible road trip narrative devolves into linguistic chaos that makes the protagonist's journey a nigh incomprehensible cacophony of baffling hallucinatory imagery.

Followers gradually accrue to the increasingly acid-addled, self-proclaimed Ouspenskian, and he becomes adulated like a messiah, shepherding the old technological order of greed and anxiety towards a new psychedelic order -- an apocalyptic prophet proclaiming rebirth in the death of diseased western civilization, midwived by weaponized lysergic acid diethylamide.

In Flanders field, the suckling poppies rose poppy-high, puppying all along in the dugged days of war's aftermyth

Like a post-apocalyptic parody of Ken Kesey's magic bus trip across the country, a Mad Maxist motorcade headed by this "self-imagined man", this neo-Christ, blasts across Europe in a meandering, delusional, anarchic crusade of renewal that becomes a self-destructive spiral into barbarism as the chosen ones forget all trappings of civilization and descend to eating slices of Christmas cactus. Will this plague of mass insanity in the name of spiritual awakening save the world or destroy it?

The guru's cult harnesses the power of the movies to spread the apocalyptic message. Cinema, once a tool for propaganda and cultural colonialism, is transformed into a gun aimed at the head of "wesciv". The centerpiece of the biopic is a re-enactment of a multi-car pileup caused by the hapless messiah, which on the big screen is spun into a glossy, Ballard-esque orgiastic miracle of mangled flesh, the erstwhile victims symbolizing the old world, played by thespian dummies who in past days graced shop windows extolling the virtues of good old middle class values like dressing properly. A Doors-like rock band meanwhile cheerleads the mass of roving acidheads (a band not with a cult following but following a cult!), making this crusade an embodiment of the various forms of 60s counterculture.

Now the whole cock-up took on the slobber-slob motion-rhythm of orgasm towards the climax of the film and the wet-mouthed awedience watched expectorately

The oft-made comparisons to FINNEGANS WAKE are not hyperbole. Stylistically and aesthetically, this book is a tour-de-force. In arabesque, neologistic, idioglossic, polyglottal language "missing every fourth symbol of recorded time", Aldiss tells a story of revolt against the theft and oppression of late phase capitalism with its cubicles and oil gushers. Of war, nuclear explosions, movies, messiahs, rock. Of a world perched on the back of a radioactive tortoise.

With its wigged out groupies and kool-aid drinking culties to whom sex with the Master is a sacrament, the book also comments on the problematic nature of man's inclination to seek leaders, whether political or spiritual - our inborn desire to be led like sheep. This is nothing new, harking back to the original cult, the well-known "cult of the third day", which worshipped "our nazerining friend embodying the rags to riches poorman's son outalk outsmart white-house-in-the-sky trouble-stirring miracle-working superman and then pow-wow-kersplat-but-oh-boy-on-the-third-day".

Didn't I the one who moist you most with nakidity remembrane to membrainfever pudentically, or if not twot hot hand gambidexter pulping lipscrew bailing boat in prepucepeeling arbor of every obscene stance?

This is not a quick read. Pages can take hours to absorb - which does not equate to understanding. Many hours will be spent poring over sentences trying to make sense. Often they still won't. The narrative will be hazily grasped - vague goings-on punctuated by moments of lucidity. Which makes sense for what purports to be a book-length acid trip. Even after finishing the book, there are vast swaths of it that remain opaque. But the beauty of the book is that, much like reading Chaucer cold turkey in the original middle English, the haze begins to part and one gradually becomes acclimatized to the language and begins to understand and appreciate its density of allusion. I can imagine finding "normal" writing somewhat boring and lacking after this dense, poetic explosion of incredibly creative prosemaking. Far from wanting the book to be over, my first urge on finishing it was to re-read it. But I'm not that masochistic.

FINNEGANS WAKE is notoriously unread. I for one appreciate Aldiss' application of WAKE technique to the form of modern genre fiction to make it more accessible, and to discover new modes of storytelling that expand the boundaries of sci-fi and inject it with a more literary quality. The plot here is actually quite linear, and the density of verbiage gives it a weight it would not otherwise have. I won't claim that Aldiss has the linguistic knowledge or poetic genius of Joyce, but I think it was a stroke of genius to use Joyce's style to translate the otherwise very visual and visceral nature of an acid trip into a written equivalent.

Was all of this really necessary, though? Many readers might be put off by the constant incomprehensibility. You could argue that the story might have been better served by more strategic use of the WAKE effect. Much as I admire Aldiss as a prose stylist -- and I think he's the best there was in SF -- there's a little part of me that fears that he went a little too far here and should have reined it in a bit; that the gobbledygook is so much sound and fury, basically just word salad, glorified scat talk. But that doesn't take away from my appreciation of the book. If Aldiss got a little carried away, it was just part of the zeitgeist. I really don't mind when Aldiss shows off a bit, because he's a spectacularly good writer. I might even argue that this book is the opposite of excess, that it represents a kind of reductio ad absurdum, that Aldiss uses the book to take the ideas of the counterculture to their logical extreme for the purpose of drawing attention to their shortcomings. The book has many possible readings.

In summation, BAREFOOT IN THE HEAD is like nothing else out there. It's super difficult but also very fun and very beautiful and rewarding to those willing to put in the effort, embodying the will to chaos and the disruptive tendencies of the era. It comes across as one big, long, insanely dense and recursive Easter egg hunt for meaning. Unlike most genre fiction or even just most novels, it's a novel that demands active effort. Every bit of reference or linguistic combination that you can manage to glean becomes a satisfying victory. This is the pinnacle of the New Wave movement and definitely explodes way beyond the genre. At the same time, you can still see the book's roots. Sci-fi fans will be able to spot references sprinkled here and there within, e.g. "let your circharacters centrifuse in the spinrads of centricourse" and "deep dischian roots". Vonnegut even shows up.

*** Avoid the recent Faber Finds reprint. It looks like they did a digital scan of the original, because the text is rife with typos symptomatic of a completely unedited digital scan, e.g. "dear" and "dose" instead of "clear" and "close" on pp. 29-30; "hilL" instead of "hill." on p. 32; etc. This is doubly ironic because Faber were the original publisher of both FINNEGANS WAKE and BAREFOOT IN THE HEAD.

[Rhys · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have just successfully finished reading Aldiss' most experimental novel, BAREFOOT IN THE HEAD, at the age of 56, my third attempt (the first when I was 18, the second a few years later). The first half of the book I always found excellent (but difficult). It's the second half I had problems with. I know it is often considered to have been inspired by FINNEGANS WAKE and I dare say it was, though somehow the extreme wordplay feels different.

It reminds me more of William Burroughs at his most arcane, THE TICKET THAT EXPLODED, and I also feel that the dialogue has borrowed a technique from Moorcock's 'Jerry Cornelius' books (the first one had been published at the time, I am not sure if the second had been). It also weirdly prefigures J.G. Ballard's CRASH and even the most recent Mad Max film. There's a bit of DM. Thomas in there too, as the prose abruptly flows into poetry mid paragraph.

Moorcock published chapters/stories of this novel separately in New World's magazine and he says that these chapters work better in the magazine than in the book itself. I strongly suspect he is right, not just because the magazine versions are tighter but because such heady and tricky experimentation is exhausting when it is relentless but invigorating when alternating with more readily absorbed fiction (Keith Roberts, John Sladek, Thomas Disch, etc).

But I am glad I have finally read it through to the end. It's a unique and important work. Having said that, I very much doubt I will ever read it again. The next Aldiss I read will surely be one of his relatively conventional books (in other words, not REPORT ON PROBABILITY A) and there are a great many of those to choose from...

[David Steele · Rating 1 out of 5]

A third of the way in I was wanting to rip the pages from this book and throw it in the trash.
Two thirds of the way in I was fantasizing about burning it in the hearth and uploading the video to Youtube.

This book is out of print, and not available digitally, which means I might make it my mission to buy and destroy every remaining copy.

This is the work of a madman, madam. I'm mad. and a man. and Tarmacadamantium. adam rantium. ranting. panting. A dam waste of my Pentium. I'm adamant at that (Its not bloody difficult, Brain).

Can I say it's unintelligible drivel? Only in the same way that I could say that about the Times Crossword. Both are supposedly very clever, and I understand neither. Much like the news read by Stanley Unwin.

I started and abandoned this book in 1987. So I thought I'd give it another go.
Ah, the wisdom of youth. I was smarter at 18 than I am today; twenty summer evenings lost in this bottomless pit.

But I didn't let it beat me. I read it to the last and now it sits by my lavatory in case I ever run short of Andrex.

[Miguel Azevedo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might very well be Brian’s strongest work.

[Allan Dyen-Shapiro · Rating 5 out of 5]

I decided to try to read Finnegan's Wake before this one, as Aldiss apparently patterned it upon Joyce's work. Although I couldn't get through much of Joyce--I've heard it said that only many literature graduate students reading it together could possibly make sense of it--I read enough to appreciate what Aldiss was doing. The setting is Europe after Muslims have bombed it in a war and released psychedelics that have much of Europe (except France) on a continuous acid trip. The protagonist is unaffected at first, but somewhere along the road to Scotland, he becomes dosed. At this point, a rock group he meets starts to think of him as the Messiah, and then others do too. He pushes a rival leader to his death, then has a child with the guy's ex-wife. Then, when it's all seeming fascistic, the leader walks away.

That's my best guess at a plot, but it's not why you'd read this. This book is all about the style borrowed from James Joyce. It simulates an acid trip. My favorite part is the individual words that he fuses with others to make a new word with a double meaning. Sentence grammar is also scrambled in most parts. He's doing this constantly (as did Joyce). The narrative breaks up at parts into alliterative passages, verse, concrete poetry, or rock song lyrics. Constant reference is made to some hippie guru mystics (real world) who talked about ways to produce an authentic self, and these references are more straightforward (as much as the philosophy of the real guys isn't).

Some of this is beautiful, some is poignant, some is funny. Some of this is a relic of a time (1969) in which rock music, New Age philosophy, and free love would save the world. It didn't, but it would have been nice if it did.

In contrast to Joyce, where a non-scholar won't get most of it, you will get most of this. The most obscure he gets is when he pays homage to various other science fiction writers of the day by making them adjectives and then fashioning a paragraph around the concerns of their work. There are phrases thrown in in German or French, but Joyce apparently used 63 different languages, so again, way more comprehensible.

This is an absolute tour-de-force of experimental fiction. This was science fiction at its freest and most daring. Inimitable, but worth the read.

[Jason · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the only Brian Aldiss novel I failed to finish. I'm sorry, Brian, I tried. You're one of my favourite authors, because you are clearly one of the best, but I just couldn't do it. Experimental writing is, I suppose, not really my thing anyway, so maybe I'm not the intended audience. In any case, if James Joyce's modernist epics are your favourite books of all time, then by all means, have at it.

[Jason · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wow this is a tough read. Non linear and trippy. Kind of a sci-fi finnegans wake. In the end I don’t think the payoff was worth the effort of reading it, although Aldiss is brilliant in his use of language in places.

[Zach S · Rating 2 out of 5]

I usually like Aldiss. However, I dnf'ed it at the last 40 pages. I felt a culmination of things, but mostly, I had no idea what was happening and didn't care. Essentially, the book follows a Serb teenager whose an anglophile, across a post-apocalyptic Europe. The bombs that had dropped were chemical LSD bombs. Throughout the entire novel, everyone is tripping. There are mass hallucinations and dialogue started to blend with consciousness. This is topped with a mad max-esc focus on automobiles flying down the roads and Autobahn.

I randomly picked this novel out to take a break from Joyce. Ironically, Joyce was a huge inspiration, and his influence of prose and make-believe words, etc, is rampant throughout the novel. This wouldn't be so bad, but the book is muddled with contemporary British hippie slang and Gurdjieffian mysticism and philosophy. It almost feels impenetrable. I found it really confusing, and towards the end, I truly didn't care about what was going on or who died, etc.

[Temucano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uno de los libros más enrevesados que he tenido el "placer" de leer. En una Europa de post guerra, todos están chiflados por el ácido desparramado a través de las lluvias y el agua, surgiendo verdaderas eclosiones de pensamiento, un eterno fluir de palabras en un mundo de locura. Tratar de razonar el libro, imposible. Lo mejor es leerlo sin detenerse, ni querer entender, a ver si logras enganchar algunas imágenes realmente alucinantes, y si pasas unas cuantas páginas de esta forma puede resultar hasta divertido. Hay que pensar además que el lenguaje tiene mucho que ver con la idea del libro, por lo que en inglés debe ser otra cosa (igual de enredada supongo).

Punto aparte para algunos cierres de capítulos donde una sola letra o palabra es repetida incansablemente, en diferentes posiciones, a través la página respectiva. Muy freak, gusto de unos muy pocos.

Fue mi primer Aldiss, por suerte no me detuvo.

15.9.2004

[Darren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Post-apocalyptic in which most of the population has had their brains addled by psychoactive drugs, causing them to communicate in a new language involving distorted/chimeric words (a la Joyce's Ulysses) which makes it hard work to follow what's going on. This is made worse by the third-party narration also being in this style, resulting in vast swathes being virtually unintelligible. Shame cos if the whole thing had been dialled back a bit this could've been excellent. 2.5 stars but rounding up cos still an interesting experiment.

[Adam Hunter · Rating 1 out of 5]

Experimental lit is great but it helps if it’s not endless pages of puns that all circle around the same subject. At least the poems were good, although why they were in there is beyond me.

[Lua · Rating 5 out of 5]

No se ni como explicar lo que leí pero me encantó

[Roddy Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘BAREFOOT IN THE HEAD

is set in a strange and elemental era. The world had died – or what was good in it had died – and all that was left was confusion and disorder.
Colin Charteris had been an ordinary young man – once. But in a drug-distorted society he became a saviour – a hero who was to lead a doomed crusade into bomb-scarred Europe – a Europe that was to prove everything and nothing to the man who went Barefoot in the Head…’

Blurb from the 1974 Corgi SF Collector’s Edition

This is not an easy read since following the first chapter which introduces the central character, Colin Charteris, the novel devolves into a variation of English which those affected by the Acid Head wars are now using.
Charteris is a Serbian travelling through Europe in the aftermath of the Acid Head wars and we meet up with him in Paris. He calls himself Charteris because he is a fan of the British author and has a romantic view of British life.
Eventually he arrives in London and meets Burton, the manager of a band, and later his friend Phil who is a prophet of sorts. Charteris, however, with contradictory Ouspenskian and Gurdjieffian views, gains a following of his own and becomes something of a Messiah.
The novel, assembled from various sequential stories in New Worlds and elsewhere, is also dotted with poems and song lyrics from the characters.

See also ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and 'Riddley Walker’.

[Alan Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This wildly experimental novel by Brian Aldiss takes place in a Britain devastated by "Acid Warfare" - in which the main weapons are undetectable drugs which force their victims into absolute joy or extreme terror. Into the chaos of a society desperately attempting to recover from the conflict comes Colin Charteris, a Serbian who has named himself after his favorite writer (Yes, the Leslie Charteris who wrote "The Saint") - and Charteris soon finds himself becoming the Messiah to a population barely maintaining their grip on reality.

Told in a disjointed, staccato style, interspersed with poems and the lyrics of imaginary rock songs (only a few of which seem to bear any relation to the plot), full of allusions, puns and stream-of-consciousness dissertations, this story out Moorcocks Moorcock, out Joyces Joyce, and takes any reader willing to stick with it on a wild, if slightly obscure ride.

Some (myself included) might have preferred a less obscure method of telling the story, but there's no doubt that Aldiss' willingness to experiment did much to push the envelope of the Science Fiction medium. As an adolescent, I loved it, but on second reading in middle age, I couldn't help but feel it was a tad too "consciously clever" for my liking. Still, a solid three stars for an intriguing read.

[Terence Park · Rating 2 out of 5]

Many of the objectives of New Wave were laudable. Some of the outcomes didn't work. Although Aldiss was producing fiction some years before New Wave SF - in the form of Michael Moorcock's New Worlds magazine - some of his output was recognisably New Wave-ish. In particular, Barefoot in the Head, which appeared as extracts in New Worlds.
Barefoot in the Head was fragmented, it was brave and it didn't work. However it's worth dwelling on it to grasp the failures of that movement. A key problem was that experimentation with broken narratives and destructured syntax was all very well in a literary journal but, despite its aspirations, New Worlds wasn't that.
The methods of producing plausible, readable, well structured narratives have been understood for hundreds of years. It was the absence of that that, in the face of the genre's ghettoisation, prompted self-help initiatives such as the Milford Group and the New Wave movement. Those issues weren't fixed with New Wave, in fact they were often made worse. New Worlds, for example, puttered around, sometimes shocking, other times dabbling on the edges of self-indulgent irrelevance, in its attempt to find its niche. Barefoot in the Head exemplifies the characteristics of that journal. It was an unsatisfying excursion that disappoints in key areas but can be appreciated as an experiment in narrative form.

[Bryan Hollerbach · Rating 2 out of 5]

This novel, of course, ranks as one of the more noteworthy works of science fiction's New Wave of the '60s and '70s, and it certainly plays with novelistic form, incorporating a number of poems and reveling in a psychedelic "storyscape." Sad to say, it left me cold--less entertaining than (say) Roger Zelazny's similar (if generally dissed) Creatures of Light and Darkness from the same era or even Robert Silverberg's way-puzzling Son of Man.

[Raymond]

experimental acid prose with poetry..shedding the multiple Gurdjieffian "i"'s and avoiding the kundalini..
i am not a fan of sci-fi per se and this is my first knowing read of anything by Alldis but...this is a groove sensation and some of the prose just oozes out and away onehow
interestingly he was on Desert Island Discs on the BBC and his chosen book was a biography of John Osbourne by John Halpern

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I believe this was borrowed from the Lake Township Library in Stevensville, Michigan while I was home from college for the summer. An rather highbrow experimental novel, I found reading it too much work.

[Allan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tried, but just couldn't finish this one.

[Armand MT · Rating 2 out of 5]

Complicada, incomprensible. No acabada

[Jack · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book isn't bad. This book isn't good. It is however creatively fun.

The book is essentially one big acid trip from start to finish. The plot is naff but it's not the reason you'd read this book again, if you were that way inclined. The creative and bizarre writing was undoubtedly my favourite part of the book. Brain Aldiss really went out on a limb with this premise and I think it mostly paid off.

The poetry wasn't great. The poems presented in the book are pieces written by Charteris and his followers, that was about as creative as they got. The only poetry that actually added anything to the book was the last set of which ended the story.

In all if the story was shorter I probably would've enjoyed it far more than I did. I'd say give this book a read if you like books that have creative writing/prose. Just don't expect any substance behind it, because there is none.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoy a difficult read, but this is just Finnegans Wake level wankery. Half the words are made up. There are some real gems, like "goddamnbiguity" or "Beaujolaid" as a verb. But mostly it's stuff like "Aged amokanisms of comprension guttering". I'd rather be challenged by the big picture stuff than parsing every paragraph, which left me no energy to make heads or tails of the psychedelic-fueled Jesus trip.

At the end of the first section, there are some poems that sort of summarize different aspects of that section. Maybe from different angles or with different emphasis. That was really cool. Later sections were also followed by poetry, but make little sense, so I could only draw the most basic connections.

[Ernest Hogan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A war fought with LSD gas bombs devastates Europe, and gives Aldis a chance to go wild extrapolating on Swinging London and beyond in a jamesjoyceian manner. Why not? Language breaking down the barriers between poetry, prose, and pop songs lyrics is like flooding a brain with neurotransmitters. Motorsways/autobahns breaking down ancient national boundaries, too. Could this be a prediction of Information Age chaos? There's even a good science fiction story about a messiah in there. I find something new each time I read it. Got a feeling that I'll be reading it again someday.

[Craig Anderson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm glad this wasn't the first thing by Aldiss that I've ever read. If it had been, I wouldn't have read anything else, and I would have missed the Helliconia trilogy. I love that one, but this one I couldn't get along with at all. Some people like it a lot, and the word-play clearly took some skill to put together. That doesn't, though, alter the fact that the book frequently lapses into gibberish, and I often had little idea what was going on. Perhaps it helps if you have experienced an acid trip, which I haven't.

[Caesar · Rating 2 out of 5]

The concept of psychological warfare is fascinating. The idea of entire populations tripping on acid is wild.
I was looking forward to a trip on the wild side into a world of hallucinated reality. But what I experienced instead was nonsensical confusion. I admit, I was lost almost from the start. I struggled to understand what was happening but gave up and tried to enjoy the ride anyway. Even that was impossible. I can't recommend or not recommend this book because I couldn’t follow what was written.