Barefoot in the Head was published by Faber and Faber in 1969, assembled from stories that appeared in New Worlds during the magazine’s most experimental period under Michael Moorcock’s editorship. The premise: during a conflict in the Middle East, Arab nations have deployed “psycho-chemical” weapons — bombs that release hallucinogenic agents — over European cities. The war is over, but its effects are permanent: the population of Western Europe is tripping, collectively and endlessly, and the distinction between reality and hallucination has dissolved.
Colin Charteris, a young Serb, drives across this hallucinatory landscape and is gradually elevated — by his followers, by circumstance, by the logic of a society that has lost its grip on reason — into a messianic figure. The narrative style mirrors the content: Aldiss’s prose disintegrates along with his characters’ perceptions, incorporating puns, portmanteau words, typographic experiments, and passages of concrete poetry. The debt to Joyce is explicit and acknowledged, though Aldiss’s Joyce is filtered through the counterculture of the late 1960s.
The novel divided readers sharply. Those who valued it saw it as a genuine literary experiment — an attempt to do for the psychedelic experience what Joyce had done for consciousness. Those who didn’t found it self-indulgent and unreadable. Both responses are defensible. The book demands enormous effort from the reader and does not always reward it, but its ambition is undeniable, and individual passages achieve a hallucinatory intensity that conventional prose cannot approach.
First edition (Faber and Faber, London, 1969): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $150–$400
- Very good/very good: $60–$150