A book is like you and me – glued to a spine and doing its best.
It’s a singularly exciting thing to be a fan of Steve Aylett.
Absolutely no one writes like him and that serves both as a gift to those who love what he does and as an impenetrable gate for those expecting someone to write weird prose in a more mundane fashion. Some writers swear by the adage that you should have one interesting and new idea on every page. Aylett lays them down so thick that you’re wading through a novel thought every sentence. His words mix like gasoline on wet pavement: shimmering, colorful , and one spark away from bursting into flames.
Aylett’s newest, The Book Lovers, continues his impeccable record of unexplainable, absurd, and thoroughly original stories that started with The Crime Studio in 1994 and continued through the intervening thirty years and over twenty books. It tells an avant-noir tale of a kidnapped heiress and the detective trying to find her in the steampunk underworld of Thousand Tower City. It is also the story of strange books and the people that love them. Books that have mirrors in them, books with exotic bindings and even more exotic interiors, and, most significantly, a book that changes from one read-through to the next. That isn’t where it ends, though.
The story, as it is explained on the label, hangs off of this book like flesh that’s a couple sizes too big. It is constantly shifting and oozing around so nothing can entirely settle to take the appropriate shape and is always threatening to tear itself apart while sporting a deranged and mischievous grin. I think I would require an entirely new language to fully encompass what is actually happening in The Book Lovers without doing it an incredible disservice in the summarization.
Aylett doesn’t even have characters in a traditional sense. He shakes up an ant farm filled with unstable ideas and waits to see what they’ll do to each other after the dustup. Dialogue rolls out of them in the forms of dueling aphorisms and unexpected turns of phrase. There is a total lack of stillness as everyone rattles around in a manic dash toward an unknowable conclusion. These are not people, they are vessels for the exploration of a deeper verbal space.
Like I said, it is a singularly exciting thing to be a fan of Steve Aylett.
It’s uncommon to find someone that repeatedly serves up something truly novel every time a new title comes out but he’s done it again with The Book Lovers. It may not end up being the best book I read this year or even my favorite but it is definitely going to be the hardest to forget. I wanted to bulk up this review by pulling samples from my favorite bits but I would’ve had to transcribe most of the book if I had. I decided that it would be best to leave this shorter than I’d like but I will conclude my thoughts on The Book Lovers with a line I feel encompasses it and every other book in Aylett’s oeuvre:
Any book could be defined as a feed of words and symbols which operates a kind of sorcery.
That’s certainly what Steve Aylett has done here and I can’t wait to see what he conjures up next.
The Book Lovers is available for purchase from our friends at Anti-Oedipus Press.
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