We always talk about the books that had profound impacts on us, and even though I think of The Anti-Death League almost every day, I forget to list it. I think partly because Kingsley Amis has fallen out of fashion -I wouldn't be surprised if he's been cancelled for saying something horribly tone-deaf, racist, or sexist, or some combination of all, (I remember his less-brilliant son Martin Amis vaguely popping up in the news for something like that several years ago) , but I can't be bothered to find out, since regardless, The Anti-Death League has imprinted on me. It taught me a lot of what I think about death, sex, and religion.
I read it perhaps thirty years ago, when I was a "voracious reader". It was an old second-hand book, which had somehow fallen into my parents' bookshelves. I had never read a book which so frankly and clearly rejected god and goddy-talk. I was a child of Middle-Eastern descent, raised in the UK (and since settled in Canada). My parents were secular, however they sent me to a small private well-regulated Christian school because they were worried I'd get bulled at the violent local comprehensive, (I was small, bespectacled, and brown(ish)). So I grew up knowing all about the Abrahamic god and the bible and all that.
And round about when I picked up The Anti-Death League , (or shortly before or shortly after) I was toying with a deep dive into religion. For a full year at some point, I was devout, saying prayers, the whole nine yards.
I can't credit just The Anti-Death League with my subsequent rejection of religion and complete embrace of atheism, but it certainly pushed me in that direction. And it was more than a polemic. I can't remember the plot, but several scenes and snatches of dialogue are still bright and sharp in my mind. It introduced me to openly gay, yet normal, accepted characters, it taught me that enjoying sex and sleeping around is not an invitation to be raped, and finally, it taught me that death is awful, we don't need to try and console ourselves about it.
Now that I wrote these words, I realised why I am thinking of this book these days so much. Now that I have experienced loss, and I feel inconsolable, and I can't turn to god. I hate that we lose the ones we love so much, and I will not stop raging about it, I refuse to be consoled, I refuse to feel better, and I have become a full member of the Anti-Death League, thirty years on.
by 1000andonenites