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THE CRETAN TEAT A profound story about history, blame, corruption, obsession, sex, the novelist and growing old disgracefully - The Cretan Teat is a wry and comic novel that interweaves its own fiction with an inner fiction about the discovery of a Byzantine painting of the Mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary suckling the infant Jesus and a fake ikon that becomes an instrument of Nemesis. Told in the first person, from the perspective of a randy but unfortunate author who becomes a character in his own novel, this clever novel, which smacks of both Pirandello and post-modernism, walks a tightrope between hilarity and tragedy as it delivers on familiar Aldiss themes, as muff-diving and nose-diving to disaster alternate to powerful effect. The Cretan Teat is without doubt Brian Aldiss' most ribald novel since The Hand-Reared Boy.