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THE INFLATABLE VOLUNTEER
Steve Aylett
Phoenix House pb, 166pp, £8.99
reviewed by Steven Dennett
There's an amusing review of Steve Aylett's short story collection Toxicology on amazon.com, which says in two lines that it's complete crap. No argument or anything. Not surprisingly, no one has recorded this review as 'useful' on their little voting pad - apart from me, because I have sympathy for the guy: Aylett's violent writing provokes reaction rather than informed discourse. The reviewer even left his e-mail address; I admire his bravery, but I fear for his hard drive.
Aylett's new spume of nonsense, The Inflatable Volunteer, is another cut-up festival of perpetual thuggery. Narrative development and characterisation are jettisoned in favour of surface-sweeps of hallucinogenic mini-scenes. Rather pathetically, in the face of the lack of plot the publicity blurb ends with: 'anything can happen and does, all the time'. One suspects a collectively dismayed throwing up of hands around the Phoenix House typewriter. But who blames them? Basically, there's a bloke called Eddie, and everyone's some kind of hoodlum, and there are loads of insects and bones being splintered, and raw guts. Etcetera.
Aylett is the boy jester. Knowingly puerile, he's at his best when he's wrily sending up his whole enterprise. Like Stewart Home, or Turner Prize winners, if you take him seriously you end up looking stupid. He'll always be one jump away from whatever a critic could carp about. (Story? Wake up, Grandad, it's Y2K.) For the post-Burroughs avant-pulpsters, it's all about the repeatedly unsettling experience of the writing rather than olde worlde stuff like connection and emotion. Aylett's world is substanceless noir; his packaging is glossy and druggy, and his metaphors are built for laughs, not swoons. Fizz and splutter, sound and fury, and a wealth of clever, funny lines - but it signifies nothing more than a party balloon in a queasy student's kitchen. Which is the whole point.
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