Publisher’s Blurb
The Cretan Teat is Brian Aldiss’ most ribald novel since The Hand Reared Boy. He presents us with an alarming narrative involving the discovery of a Byzantine painting of the Mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary suckling the infant Jesus: a fake icon becomes an instrument of nemesis. The narrator is a randy but unfortunate author who intrudes in his own story. This clever tale, which smacks of both Pirandello and post-modernism, walks a tightrope between hilarity and tragedy. As such it bears the true Aldissian hallmarks, as muff-diving and nose-diving to disaster alternate to powerful effect.

Brian Says

A novel that did not entirely hatch, the parts being better than the whole.It did serve, however, as a warning signal that Aldiss had begun writing novels that involved art as much as science.

FIRST EDITION: House of Stratus, 2001/2