Brian Aldiss · 1969 · road

Brian Aldiss's 1969 psychedelic fever-dream of a novel. Years after an Acid Head War, in which the West was drenched in hallucinogenic aerosols, a young Serb who has taken the English name Colin Charteris abandons his refugee-resettlement work in southern Italy and drives his car, the Banshee, north across a deranged, drug-warped Europe toward England. Taken up as a messiah by the addled crowds, he leads a shambolic crusade back onto the continent, its language and reality dissolving around him into pun and vision. The prose itself comes apart into Joycean wordplay as Charteris goes, at last, barefoot in the head.

1. 1
   Catanzaro

   Charteris throws over his United Nations resettlement work in Calabria and points the Banshee north, out of Italy and toward the England he knows only from adventure stories.

2. 2
   Metz

   Two thousand kilometres later he halts in Metz, where a vision of the branching multiplicity of every human path first takes hold of him.

3. 3
   Calais

   He drives on across a France gone soft and hallucinatory to the Channel coast.

4. 4
   London

   Crossing to a Britain worst hit of all by the aerosols, he is proclaimed a messiah and gathers a following among the musicians and drifters.

5. 5
   Ostend

   He leads his crusade back over the water to the continent, landing at Ostend.

6. 6
   Brussels

   On the road to Brussels a multi-car pile-up kills a follower driving Charteris's own car, and the crowd takes it for his death and resurrection.

7. 7
   The Rhineland

   Shaking free of the delusion of his own godhead, he wanders on eastward into bomb-scarred Germany, and out of the story.