Saturday, July 21, 2001
Title: The Inflatable Volunteer
Author: Steve Aylett
Publisher: Phoenix House
"My cool demeanour comes of being used for target practice as a child - all that ducking, wincing and screaming, I got it out of me early."
When reviewing a book it probably helps if you can explain a little bit about what happened in it. Unfortunately with The Inflatable Volunteer it seems to be something I can't do - I mean I've read it, cover to cover - but haven't the foggiest about what happened. The back of the book quotes other reviews raving about it - I wonder if any of them explained what it was about? This is the second book I've read by Aylett - the previous was out there, but coherent. The Inflatable Volunteer is instead a stream of conscious, which in theory follows the adventures of the narrator and his recounting through tall tales. However it is clear as you read it that there is no real sense of time or much of anything else, each chapter starts with a location and conversation (in theory) but as it progresses you lose all sense of whether he moved and started to talk to someone else or whether it was all part of the story he was telling. Massively tangential, the situation arises where you have some very funny lines of dialogue, but those don't bear any relation to the ones before or after - with each character spouting profound nonsense with the turn of each page. To be clear - I enjoyed this book a lot, found it pretty funny - but its difficult to read, requiring a lot of attention to even keep track of what page you are on. The secret code that reveals all the world's truth? Or a drunken and fabulous tale told one night in a pub to people that can barely understand coherent sentences by people that can barely say coherent sentences?
"Held a tiny jade effigy of Lee Oswald in the pouch of each cheek. That's how serious I was."
RVWR: PTR
July 2001
