The Inflatable VolunteerSteve Aylett
Phoenix House paperback, 166 pages, £8.99
Review by Tony White (2000)
With his fourth novel Aylett has once again set himself the difficult task of writing the most precisely deranged fiction in the English-speaking world. Puzzling that his books have often been filed in the crime sections. For one thing, the sheer volume of the body count in any of his works to date would be enough to keep a fair-sized army of pro-am detectives busy for life. For another, he’s doing much more than chucking the corpse of genre fiction on the slab and conducting a messy, rubber-gloved post mortem. Just have a flick through the reviews printed inside the front cover to see the august company with which he’s being compared; Burroughs, Runyon, Lear, et al. Impressive stuff, and what’s more these are apposite comparisons, though there’s a lot more on offer here than the sum of influences (if influences they are).
The first thing that strikes you about The Inflatable Volunteer is the contents page. Chapter by chapter, the novel’s concentric narrative structure first drags you in one character, or group of characters, at a time (e.g. ‘What I told the bastards at the bar’), then spits you out in reverse order by telling you what the trouble with each of them was. Reading on, this formal conceit proves strangely seductive, if bewildering.
Aylett has intimated that there’s a story buried in here somewhere, and he should know. Certainly, for the first few pages I was able to kid myself that if I could only dig through the tangled roots of the thing I might find it. But a cautionary tale on page 83 (admittedly about aliens disposing of body parts through their gill flaps) echoed my acceptance that this wasn’t likely to happen in a hurry: ‘Nothing worse than a man who’s dug all day and found his own reflection in a shallow pond’. In any case, by then I was enjoying myself too much to care.
This is fiction with all the gritty social realism of a Tex Avery cartoon (though probably more gas per minute), a gift for one liners only equalled by Mark Leyner, and pyrotechnic imagery which explodes out of almost every sentence. Throughout, Aylett manages to combine his Tourette-ish, hair trigger sense of humour with a gift for deadpan which makes Buster Keaton look like a grinning fool.
So far, whether by accident or design, every other novel by Aylett has been set in the town of Beerlight (crime capital of the known universe), where ‘to kill a man [is] less a murder than a mannerism’, and where the jukeboxes in the Delayed Reaction Bar play ‘the steady spatter of an Ingram M11 sub’. Those of you haven’t come across the Beerlight novels before may be interested to know that the last one, Slaughtermatic, a 1998 Philip K Dick award nominee, has been released in paperback to coincide with publication of The Inflatable Volunteer. Fans, on the other hand, will be thrilled to learn that several short stories are set in that cursed borough, which have appeared here and there (including in my own britpulp! Anthology) are among the delights on offer in the US publication of Aylett’s first short story collection, Toxicology (Four Walls Eight Windows, $12.95).
When I first read Slaughtermatic – knowing that more Beerlight books are in the pipeline – I remember wondering whether Aylett’s trademark round dark glasses might become as recognisable as Pratchett’s hat – with Beerlight the Discworld of this dawning decade. And if that’s a bit of a curse to lay on any writer, I’d at least suggest that in years to come neither of these two books will be discussed without the prefixes ‘vintage’ and ‘early’ being added to the author’s name. That is, if there’s a tad more justice in this world than there is in Beerlight. •