Giddy with excitement after reading The Malacia Tapestry, I wanted more Brian Aldiss, so when I saw a second-hand copy of Report On Probability A I snatched it up. Unfortunately, it looks like Brian Aldiss's output isn't as consistent as I'd hoped it would be: the Report is an interesting experiment that was probably fun to write but isn't especially fun to read.

The bulk of the book covers the surveillance of the house of Mr and Mrs Mary by three observers, named only G, S, and C. G used to be Mr Mary's gardener, S used to be his secretary and C used to be his chauffeur; as the novel progresses we learn that they were all fired for overfamiliarity with Mrs Mary, but none of them could bring themselves to leave: as such, they are all hiding out in the various outbuildings of the Mary estate, and all of them obsessively watch the house, hoping for a glance of Mrs Mary.

In each chapter we get a few paragraphs describing the goings-on in various parallel universes. At first, we just concentrate on one parallel universe, in which a man is reading a report on the universe of G, S, and C; in fact, we find out that the narrative of the Mary house is this very report, compiled through an unspecified method of glimpsing events in alternate potential realities. Later on, we find ou that the man who is reading a report is being watched by a band of men standing on a hill in another parallel universe, who are being monitored by a psychic in another, who is being observed by the Pentagon in another, and so on and so forth in an infinite regression that goes precisely nowhere. The people in the various alternate realities are convinced of the significance of Mrs Mary (who is watching all of them on some kind of screen), and of The Hireling Shepherd, a Victorian painting which G, S, and C all possess a copy of in their hiding places. In the conclusion, we find that The Hireling Shepherd depicts events that are, in fact, happening in yet another parallel universe; the ultimate implication, of course, is that all works of fiction are, in their own way, doors into parallel universes, and that the reader himself is yet another link in the great chain of observers; it's only through an act of restraint on Aldiss's part that he doesn't try to write about an observer who is spying on the reader reading the book.

This is the sort of thing which could only have been considered deep and profound (as opposed to solipsistic and meaningless) in the 1960s, and I was utterly unsurprised to find a plug for the Illuminatus! trilogy (the ultimate exercise in meaningless solipsism masquerading as meaningful, enlightening philosophy) in the back of my edition. These brief snippets of observers from other worlds, which are always given a great deal of importance by people trying to summarise the book, are actually highly irrelevant: nothing happens in them, we never concentrate on one observer long enough to really get an idea of their character, and the book wouldn't be that much shorter if they were cut out entirely. The one thing you can say for them is that they break up the monotony of reading the main narrative, and if the main narrative is so monotonous it requires constant little breaks then something is very fucking wrong with your writing, Mr Aldiss.

Ah yes, the report itself. Part of the reason the report is monotonous is that it is very repetitive. It first depicts things from the point of view of G, then S, then C, and each time everything the characters see is described again, as if it were being encountered for the first time. On one hand, this is a nice way of illustrating how the different characters' own perceptions of the world differ. On the other hand, do we need to have the same objects described two or three times, in ever-increasing detail, from the same character's point of view? I would say not. My irritation was only increased by Aldiss's incredible blunder of having the people in the various parallel universes interpret the report on the reader's behalf, a practice akin to interspersing the Cliff's Notes on your book in between the chapters. Just as I picked up on the fact that the differing descriptions of The Hireling Shepherd were meant to illustrate the differing obsessions and preoccupations of G, S, and C, some irrelevant bastard from an alternate reality popped up and said "Wow, the differing descriptions of this painting seems to shed light on the differing obsessions and preoccupations of G, S, and C! Isn't that interesting?"

Aldiss uses these intrusive remarks to justify the report as well as to interpret it. We are told that Victorian paintings represent a freezing of time in the moment before a cataclysmic event, and are asked to consider that the report is very much like those paintings: presenting a snapshot in time as opposed to a series of events. It is interesting to note that this approach worked well in The Malacia Tapestry - but at least stuff actually happened in that book; like a tapestry, it depicts a sequence of events, and like Aldiss's Victorian paintings it offers a snapshot of something (in this case, a society) before a cataclysmic event (in this case, a revolution). Unfortunately, devoid of events, the Report occupies itself solely with coming up with a snapshot, and while it occupies a mercifully brief 160 pages that's still too many for what is essentially a description of a static scene. A picture may speak a thousand words, but in Report On Probability A Aldiss goes wildly, insanely over-budget. For God's sake, avoid this gimmicky, pretentious, over-hyped, over-praised, boring acid casualty of a book; The Malacia Tapestry manages to use the same idea, deploys it in a vastly superior manner, and provides you with a whole host of other wonderful things besides.