Читать книгу Fain The Sorcerer - Steve Aylett - Страница 2

If we loved Steve Aylett, really loved him in the way that he deserves, a selfless love that genuinely wanted nothing save his happiness and comfort, we’d lobotomise him. Nothing complicated or too costly, just a well-judged swipe with shovel blade or flat iron when he isn’t looking ought to do the trick. This would afford him satisfaction in more ways than one. Firstly, it would confirm his previous opinion of us personally and of humanity in general, and secondly it might impair him mentally, thus furthering his career. If he could just stop the Tourette’s flood of original ideas, dilute the language so the reader only had to pause and shake their head in admiration every paragraph or so rather than every other line, this man could be a sales phenomenon, could be a franchise; it’s all just a shovel-blow away. There would be glowing twelve-year-olds lined up in Waterstones at midnight for the latest Beerlight or Accomplice saga, there’d be blockbusters, Jeremy Paxman flirting openly with Aylett during Newsnight, Lint confectionery, Hell toys. Best of all, with his critical faculties all having gone the same way as his frontal lobe, he’ll have no idea that he’s writing tepid drivel and can just enjoy himself, can ride round Tunbridge Wells in a gold dodgem car, eating cream cakes and laughing.

Clearly, though, none of us love him that much, and especially not those of us who love his work. We’d prefer, for his sake, that he could be brilliant with a large, sophisticated audience whose polish was sufficient to reflect his dazzle but, in lieu of that, we’ll settle for brilliant-and-suffering. There are few people who can suffer as amusingly, revealingly or fruitfully as Aylett can, nobody with a talent for the torment so that they can turn their horror at the ocean of stupidity around them into something at once visionary and disablingly funny. It should also be said that within the field of fantasy and science fiction there are very few creators half as dogged or uncompromising in the pursuit of their muse as is Steve Aylett, or with such good reason.

With the death of William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard mourned the passing of one of the last committed writers, noting that Burroughs’ demise had left us only ‘career novelists’, the ones who had already lined up for the lucrative, blunt-spade accomplished neural surgery as mentioned earlier. These wordsmiths, spayed and tame, know where the grazing land is good and never wander past the stinging cattle-wire of audience comprehension out into the income-threatening wilderness beyond, out into the disreputable pulp-jungles of genre, into art. They know enough to hoard their fuel, dilute the energy to homeopathic doses that will not prove toxic to their audience or sales, to make one second-hand and borrowed concept last a chapter, last for a whole book. Whatever else you do, for God’s sake don’t burn twenty new ideas with every page as blazing throwaways. That just makes all the other workers on the line look bad, and anyway the constitutions of the readership are for the most part not adapted to ingest raw fire, preferring in the main its faintest after-taste, a water-memory of fire rather than the untreated magma.

Aylett, thankfully, has never met or listened to these people, and instead is gloriously unaware which side his bread is buttered. He just keeps on hurtling along, a Porky Pig express train that’s dismantling its own box cars to provide the sleepers for the tracks ahead as it roars smoking out amongst the cartoon cacti. When he first emerged in the science fiction field it was into a world of categories and labels that had no idea what to make of him. Was he a cyber-punk, a nano-punk, an Alfred Jarry pata-punk, or just somebody who’d turned up to take the piss? Was this science fiction comedy, in which case why no punning titles, why no obvious Robert Sheckley retreads, no easy referents, no ‘in the grand tradition of...’ ? Why weren’t there any plots that worked as a three-minute pitch, a three-line jacket blurb? Was he just trying to unsettle everyone?

In fact, Steve Aylett was no kind of literary punk at all. He just liked sunglasses, and that’s what had us all confused. If there are any influences to be glimpsed in the almost self-conscious and relentless onslaught of sheer novelty that is his work, they seem to be the influences of an earlier time when there was nothing punk and not much outside Dr. Who was cyber; of a period where, when it came to science fiction authors, individual voices were appreciated, and were more than that, demanded. Had he not been born, with perfect Aylett irony, in the Summer of Love, been born too late, he might have had a Michael Moorcock New Worlds as a vehicle, have had a context in amongst all of the other brilliant, mismatched oddballs. Aylett is in many ways a staunch traditionalist in that he harks back, ultimately, to the Judith Merrill days when science fiction still had a tradition of originality, before we based our writings on a calculated demographic strategy, when intellectual shock was one of the main reasons that we bothered with science fiction in the first place, and when trilogies of sorcerer-infested fantasy were the exception rather than the norm.

Which brings us to this current volume, Fain the Sorcerer, concrete proof that had Steve Aylett launched himself into the marketplace of fantasy rather than that of science fiction, then he would have been no less a marvel nor a prodigy, and he still would have frightened and bewildered us by turn. This is not comic fantasy in the restricted sense the term is used today, the knowing and post-modern slapstick with the title that lampoons a work more widely known, but is instead aggressively inventive, with a comedy that’s unrelenting, one of those transcendent satires that ends up a radiant, sublime example of the genre that it’s satirising, like Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Hunters. This is fresh, exciting comic fantasy, but it is also fresh exciting fantasy without the qualifier. Speaking as someone who for some years now has had difficulties with the concept of magical fantasy, this book was a reminder of the way that it was meant to work, a nitrous oxide rush of notions that at times recalls Jack Vance’s Dying Earth as it might be hallucinated by an M.C. Escher, with its self-imperilled hero and the labyrinthine mess he brings upon himself more than a match for Vance’s Cugel.

In fact, as is the case with Aylett’s greatest influence, Jeff Lint, one can sense an oblique resemblance between the author and his subject. One gets the impression that what drew Steve Aylett to the understandably neglected Lint was simple kinship. Maybe Aylett too once had an agent that turned out to have been dead for years. This current book suggests at least an empathy between the author and what is in this case his entirely fictional creation, Fain the Sorcerer. Like Steve Aylett, we have a protagonist whose very ingenuity is his undoing, who has somehow found a scam whereby he can unreel a seemingly unending list of magical abilities which both bewilder and delight. At one point in the narrative Fain backs away dispensing gold coins from one pocket of his coat and sardines from the other, which is an illuminating metaphor for the entirety of Aylett’s oeuvre.

Read the book, first to yourself, then, unavoidably, aloud to friends until they’re sick of you. Hope that Steve Aylett’s soul-destroying trail of tears continues if this is an indication of the nuggets that he’s finding on the way. Hope also that he one day realises how ridiculous he is and is delivered in that instant to a lovely maskfaced mermaid, all his endlessly amusing tribulations done. This is a stunning work of the imagination that is also very, very funny, from one of the most exciting and innovative creators to emerge in years. See him, the fabulous self-cursing magus as he backs away, flinging his golden talents and his glittering sardines, each as enticing as the other, offering not only opulence but also salty nourishment. This book, replete with both, is an extravagant and satisfying feast that you should savour, even while resisting the temptation to devour it in a single sitting. Aylett is a jeweller, and this work is one of his most finely chiselled gems. Hold it up to the light and study at your leisure.

Alan Moore

Northampton

July, 2005