A strange, brilliant experiment that ultimately doesn't succeed. This isn't really a novel -- I believe that Aldiss called it an "anti-novel" -- since it's overwhelmingly composed of extremely detailed, repeated descriptions of the same ordinary settings and people. Three men are living on the grounds on a house, trying to watch a woman living in it, and they themselves are being observed by people from another dimension, who note down everything that they can note down because they aren't sure which of their assumptions about people would hold true.

The book is a difficult read -- page after page of descriptions of, say, the items in the shack that the ex-gardener is living in -- but you can feel Aldiss' intelligence burning through it. It's not merely an SF plot concerning how much we could know about people who seem to look like us but may not be. It's an extended meditation on writing, on the conventions of writing, on how real scenes become literary scenes and what is kept and what is left out, on the reader as observer.

I think that the book ultimately would have been more rewarding if, by the end, the reader had known less of what was going on. But Aldiss finally appears to give his three close-in watching characters a conventional, understandable reason for being there. The satisfaction of the usual drives of the reader would, I think, have been better avoided for this work to have its best effect. ( )

A recursive paranoid masterpiece?
An inquiry into the implications of an observer-defined quantum reality?
A derailing of time across the multiverse?

Nope. Just a long, slow, repetitive read -- probably the idea of what a factual report must look like to somebody who has never read one.

You're not missing anything by skipping this one. ( )

More than any other novel I’ve read, you need almost superhuman patience for this one. First there’s the style—“pedantic, meticulous” doesn’t begin to describe it—and then the plot (or lack of one): it’s like a detailed attempt at describing nothing happening.
   And yet, clearly something did happen here in the recent past. The focus is a house with a large garden around it; in this garden are a wooden shed, an old brick coachhouse and a garage—and hiding, one in each of these, are G, S and C who are keeping the house itself under near-constant surveillance. Why? Well that’s one of the things the people watching them would like to know—G, S and C are themselves being observed by Domoladossa (or at least, he is sitting in a chair reading a detailed report on what he calls “Probability A”). As he does this though, Domoladossa is himself being observed through some sort of portal or aperture by the Distinguishers; who are, in turn…and so on. We too, of course, are a link in this chain, or this stack of levels, or sequence of parallel universes, observing them by means of Aldiss’s book. Makes you wonder who’s observing us.
   There is a mystery here: why are the three men, G, S and C (former gardener, secretary and chauffeur at the house being observed) all in hiding? The focus of their attention seems to be the woman who lives there…her husband, meanwhile, is glimpsed at a window holding a rifle… Yet the way even the most mundane of details are described—drips of rainwater for instance, leaking through the garage roof—is so sharply, so microscopically, observed it’s like seeing it all through a magnifying lens, or in a piece of film run at half-speed. The overall effect is strange; but not in a freaky, wildly surreal, barking mad kind of strange. The very opposite in fact.
   Which I think is the point: that, if you could see it all fresh, as if you’d never set eyes on any of it before, even the everyday world would look downright peculiar. This is an attempt at describing raw existence, and the real mystery is of any of it being here at all. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2019/09/review-of-report-on-probability-by.html ( )

Dull slug... ( )