Steve Aylett

Who the FUCK has been hiding Steve Aylett from me for thirty-nine years. I want answers. What is this, a conspiracy of librarians? A booksellers' union grudge? This rebarbative but very funny novel takes the form of a biography of the pulp writer Jeff Lint – a sort of mash-up of Phillip K Dick, Robert E Howard and Alan Moore – and it is filled with more surprising word-collocations and startling throwaway ideas than anything I've read for months. From the opening, I was hooked:

Pulp show more science fiction author Jeff Lint has loomed large as an influence on my own work since I found a scarred copy of I Blame Ferns in a Charing Cross basement, an apparently baffled chef staring down from the cover. After that I hunted down all the Lint stuff I could find and became a connoisseur of the subtly varying blank stares of booksellers throughout the world.

Um…yes, I'll have two hundred pages of that, please. Across twenty-seven chapters – whose academic style soon dissolves into a kind of lysergic incomprehensibility – we learn the details of Lint's eventful career, including not just his fictional output (such as ‘the trash novel Sadly Disappointed about a child who is not possessed by the devil’), but also his forays into television in the form of a Star Trek script (in which ‘the smug, unoriginal blandness aboard the Enterprise finally reaches such an unnatural pitch that it triggers an event horizon’), his brush with Hollywood, his role as a New Mexican guru, and his work as a lyricist with a prog-rock band, penning such tracks as ‘DNA Interruption Charm’, ‘Through the Keyhole I Saw the Funeral of a Duck’ and ‘Dead or Not, He Was Wearing Shades’.

The tone is synaesthetic and off-kilter, but nevertheless in a tradition of British comic writing that feels familiar in the oddest places. Near the end of the book comes one of its best lines:

On July 13, 1994, Lint had a near-death experience, followed immediately by death.

…which is pure Douglas Adams. But in other ways the voice is recognisably post-Chris Morris, except it's like all of Chris Morris's career concertinaed together, from the exact journalese of On The Hour (headlines mentioned in this book include WRITER IS MADE OF CHIMP MEAT and the misprint-result OBSCENE PLAY ATTRACTS MASSIVE CROW) through to the ambient, adrenal creepiness of Blue Jam, reflected here in the descriptions of Lint's terrifying cartoon series Catty and the Major.

Aylett's rococo non-sequiturs, and his tinges of weird fiction and body-horror, put him somewhere on the edge of the bizarro camp, except that unlike most bizarro authors Aylett can really write. Like Lint, he spends much of this book ‘rampaging through the English language like a buffalo’; at times his words seem like mere aesthetic objects, with no referents in the real world, and your eyes start to glaze over; but at others, they connect with a jolt. Again, a description of Lint's writing applies just as well to his creator's:

Every sentence expands in all directions at once and it becomes immersive to the point of hallucination. The story falls away into a heavy feverdream, a sort of constant metamorphosis parade. Ideas turn corners on themselves and thump axes in their own backs.

I found that you needed a run-up with the prose before you warmed up to it; then a certain cumulative effect kicked in, and every sentence became hilarious. But if I read too much, it overwhelmed me again. This is a book best consumed in medium doses.

I was in a strange place when I read Lint – working twenty-hour days and sleeping somewhere new every night. I would fall into bed at 1 a.m. with my alarm set for quarter to five, and read a few paragraphs of this before I passed out. In this drained, hypnotic state, I found that the gnomic pronouncements of Jeff Lint (‘Television is light filled with someone else's anxiety’) actually started to make a weird kind of sense. Worrying, perhaps. Part of me would like to see this talent reined in a little more by some formal discipline, but I will forgive a lot for a book that made me laugh out loud as often and as uncontrollably (like holding-in-giggles-during-school-assembly uncontrollable) as this one did. I emerged confused, but buffed into a creative hypersensitivity.

You can take these away with you:

● It was repeatedly rumoured that Lint's gonzo article ‘Mashed Drug Mutants’ had a subtext that was nothing to do with drugs, but Lint denied this.

● [during McCarthy's anti-Communist crackdowns] Lint was twitted the same year when three friends dressed as cops raided his apartment and found him forcing a bust of Lenin down the toilet.

● Lint had recently been hired to create a tourist slogan for the town, and came up with ‘Holiday parasites are welcome in a way, aren't they?’

● In response to astronomers' observations that the universe seemed to be rushing away from us, he remarked ‘Wouldn't you?’ show less

If you're going to write a book banging on about the importance of originality in thought and expression, you'd better make sure it's written in a really god-damn original way. And Steve Aylett's prose is, right enough, so original that after a few pages many readers may be forgiven for thinking that that's quite enough originality for one day, thanks. Like Nabokov, but to an infinitely greater degree, Aylett creates sentences so utterly stripped of banalities and stock phrases that they show more almost repel: it's not so much that he is not at home to Mr Cliché, but rather that he's waiting behind the front door to garrotte Mr Cliché and bury him under the back patio. You fly over his craggy paragraphs exhausted, searching desperately for somewhere smooth enough to land. Quite often, you end up travelling somewhere else by mistake.

I said earlier that readers might be forgiven for finding it all too much, but then I am a more tolerant person than Steve Aylett, who himself shows no sympathy whatsoever for those content to recycle other people's ideas, or to consume the results with bland satisfaction. ‘While many claim to crave originality,’ he says, ‘they feel an obscure revulsion when confronted with it.’ But though he acknowledges the revulsion, he obviously thinks we should all be doing more to get over it, instead of just buying further paperbacks from writers who ‘have as much artistic ambition as a fossilized spud’.

Part of the fun of this book is seeing him get specific about this, as when he suddenly launches an unexpected attack on other writers:

In American Psycho, Ellis pretended to say what everyone knew already about consumer society, but when trying to embed what he really meant he found he didn't know whether to shoot a cake or kiss an ostrich. He gave up, leaving only the decoy, a husk which met with great success and was taken as a standard template for the modern novel. To believe it went otherwise is to accept that he was a conscious fraud. Perhaps if a book is entirely empty we shouldn't feel bad about filling it.

Even better are the pithy throwaways.

Many make do with China Mieville, quite simply one of the science fiction writers in the UK.

These things are thrown out mid-paragraph, like a knives lobbed into a crowd by a horribly committed dadaist. In the end, surveying the range of lifts, borrowings and imitations in most artistic creation, Aylett concludes with magisterial derision: ‘It's pathetic to have someone else's gut feeling.’

True originality, by contrast, ‘increases the options, not merely the products’. He does touch on a few writers that he seems to admire (Tove Jansson, Greg Egan and – bafflingly to me – Michael Moorcock are all mentioned with approbation), and enjoins readers to ‘be ravenous’ in order to dig out their own gems. ‘Real creativity is a ferocity of consciousness,’ he suggests, and for him this begins at the level of individual word choice, which gets an attention that I found particularly gratifying.

Words have the device-like detailed architecture of diatoms, and a glowing soul. A word will present itself as armatured with potential, as though with arms open, calling via your intuition to another word in another environment. You can enrich the stuff of life by bringing together two words which have never, ever been introduced to one another before. Perhaps because they dwell in different contexts or in the jargon of different disciplines, they are never held in the attention at the same time. Yet when put together, their cogs mesh as if they were made for each other and a massive amount of energy is released.

Any Aylett sentence will provide examples of such unexpected and productive collocations – as, for instance, when he describes Antonin Artaud as having ‘a face like a wet kestrel’, or when he writes that ‘A system is never so good that it couldn't be improved by a hen on a rampage’. In fact one of the surprises of Heart of the Original is just how practical some of the advice in here is, despite its quasi-parodic clothing. I loved this:

I was doing a story about a childhood visit to the circus and wrote ‘They pounced, two clowns holding me by the arms while a fourth beat the bejesus out of me.’ I found this mistake of the missing third clown very funny but didn't know why. When the mind has to jump a gap, the spark it fires can tickle the brain's surface or ignite unused pathways, depending on the guidelines placed on either side.

The book is itself a demonstration of the technique, compressed and elided at times to the point of incomprehensibility but frequently exhilarating anyway. He refers in passing, for instance, to Jesus' ‘suicide-by-cop’, or writes of creative expression that ‘It leaves you raw enough to feel your reflection granulate across a mirror's surface’.

Somewhere beyond the literary ectopia characterising Aylett's writing, there is – perhaps surprisingly – a core of real emotion and belief which in lazy shorthand you might call political. In this book, it's especially exhilarating because it's not just about other artists and how they should be assessed, it's also about how you can think and feel and react more creatively yourself. The consequences of this go beyond the world of the arts and soak into almost everything else. As Aylett cautions, ‘You may even live a life with repercussions.’ show less

Welcome to Accomplice, population: deranged.

The setting for these slipstream novels is summed up efficiently enough in the third book:

Accomplice was a sun trap lidding an etheric mesh of connecting tunnels, the creepchannel. This toxic tissue formed a subterranean transit system for demons on their way to people's breakdowns.

That's as good an explanation as you're going to get, frankly.

Steve Aylett – the Bizarro Bard of Bromley – treats the English language like a roll of bubble-wrap, show more popping it apart in bursts of aesthetic pleasure and leaving it limp and drained. As with the first time I picked up The Naked Lunch, I spent a lot of time with Aylett wondering if I'd forgotten how to read. Since this is a reaction prompted both by great originality and by great incompetence, it takes a while to assess what you're dealing with, but I ended up convinced.

The fact I was laughing so much was the biggest clue. His writing kind of re-wires your brain: after putting one of his books down, everyone else's prose seems either bland, or unintentionally hilarious. I've already talked in punishing detail about his general technique in reviews of the individual books:

Only an Alligator
The Velocity Gospel
Dummyland
Karloff's Circus

These are definitely fated to remain a minority taste. But as the great Bingo Violaine said: ‘Consensus is reality with the crusts cut off.’ show less

Ah Lint, Jeff Lint.
I remember when I first came across a book of his as an impressionable teenager wandering the aisles of Galaxy Books in old Sydney-town. There it was, in the bargain bin, "I Eat Fog"; well-creased, a smattering of coffee stains, a purple, distorted, displeased mans' face. A collection of early short stories so strange as to flip your brain lobes, so pulpy as to rub your teeth gritty. Brilliant stuff, really.
I hunted down as much of his work as I could, every ratty show more flea-market stall, every brightly lit box-bookshop, the classics: One Less Bastard, Jelly Result, I Blame Ferns, Turn Me Into a Parrot, The Caterer, and many others...

I must say, I've been kicked out of more bars for arguments started over the merits of Lint's work than I care to admit. Now, finally, rather that punching some bloke for questioning Lint's sexual-orientation (so what if a man kits up in a dress and wig to deliver his manuscripts? It was the 60s for crimminy's sake!), I can just give them a copy of Ayletts' brilliant biography. Bravo, Mr. Aylett. Next round's on me. show less