Thursday, March 21, 2002
Title: Toxicology
Author: Steve Aylett
Publisher: Gollancz
Reading Toxicology comes across as a flashback to The Inflatable Volunteer - recreating the baffled sense of wonder that one experienced with that free-form novel. Though in saying that, Toxicology is not another novel by Steve Aylett rather it is a collection of "short stories". I think most people have a perception of what length a short-story should be, for the most part these pieces are shorter than that - Aylett hitting us with a couple of pages at a time and moving on. In contrast to The Inflatable Volunteer, I tended to find that Toxicology was a demanding read in a different way, despite its mere 120 or so pages I took longer to read it - rather than having to keep up with the momentum of The Inflatable Volunteer I found that after each story I instead had to stop and take a moment. Ploughing on into the next story made me feel flippant, as though I expected to be able to just absorb everything as it happened.
Steve Aylett has written a trilogy of books set in the one environment - The Crime Studio, Bigot Hill and Slaughtermatic - with some of the stories coming from that background so that the ideas of the perfect thought crime are at work as is the repeated presence of the confounding copper Henry Blince and private investigator Atom (who featured in the book of the same name). Some of the stories are just random, where Aylett hits us with a full on flow of consciousless diatribe.
It may be worth noting (though perhaps only for myself) that the first contact I had with Aylett's work was with the story Gigantic, which is the first piece featured here. A millennial piece from a millennial collection where the history of the past is revisited on the people of the present; a story populated by crack pots and nutters so that the only truth sayer is lumped in with the rest. Tusk works with the ideas of masks and the relationship between a criminal and his mask. If Armstrong Was Interesting explores the options that Neil Armstrong could have gone for through his famous moon trip if he had actually been interesting, I mean come on "one giant step" is so lame when you could have "not bad for a girl". The Passenger deals with the lengths that some folk will go to get noticed, just to get that big break their band deserves - extreme! The Met Are All For This deals with modern surveillance and paranoia, all with a nice Kafkaesqe twitch of phrase. Fiasco shows how badly things can go wrong when you just set out to do someone a favour. And so on across 25 stories which don't really bare neat summary of this fashion. After all how can neat summary really capture the idea of a man who calls his dog Fire and then is surprised when people reacting oddly when he calls its name or when original thought comes down to the declaration that bees are aerodynamically wrong for flight and really move the world about around them with telekinesis.
One of the senseless beauties of Toxicology is that you could probably get to the end and start all over again and in the process get something entirely different out of it. That is of course if you thought that you were hard enough to take reading text this dense again so soon. I know I'm not.
RVWR: PTR
March 2002
