I have been reading Steve Aylett for more than three decades — his first novel, THE CRIME STUDIO, was published in 1994. His latest book, THE BOOK LOVERS, was published in the UK in 2024, and has just now come out in the US from Anti-Oedipus Press.
Though I read Aylett with extreme delight and fascination, I have little idea how to write or speak about his novels. I told my friend Marleen Barr, trying to explain, that I think Aylett is the greatest prose stylist in the English language since James Joyce. While I stand by this claim, I do not know how to justify it to anyone who is skeptical about it (which is, I presume, almost everyone). Aylett doesn’t do lush and hypnotic long sentences like Marguerite Young, and he doesn’t compress the widest possible range of language into the verncular, like Thomas Pynchon. (They are the only two other post-Joyce English-language writers who, to my mind, have a similar brilliance of style). Rather, Aylett writes with such precision that every sentence in his books, whether dialogue or description, has the polished elegance and paradoxical wit of an Oscar Wilde-style epigram; only you have to imagine a Wilde who has been kidnapped by Mister Mxyzptlk and sent into the fifth dimension.
When the characters speak to one another, they seem to be referring to this style of their language as much as to anything else. To give an example — one where the prose is closer to apprehensible meaning than is the case ninety percent of the time — consider this: “This pose of yours, does it prevent your ablutions? You are so exacting in your affectations, they seem rather joyless. Are you merely following orders?” This is from Inspector Nightjar a female police officer trying to interrogate a man who never seems to conform to expectations. Nightjar is one of the heroes (or heroines) of this book. As the other heroine, Sophie Shafto, says of her at one point: “She’s a legend! Incongruously competent and honest! Her life is pure hell!”
Things do happen in the course of this novel, though it is difficult to explain exactly what they are. The book is set in what seems to be a simulacrum of late-19th-century London. Most people walk or travel by horse-and-buggy, though there also do seem to be primitive automobiles. A lot of the action seems to involve books and their ambiguities. We hear a lot about books that change their words every time they are read. There are even epic catalogues of such books: “A book of keyholes, a book of beginnings, a book illustrating ominous curse medals, a book in which every word is a reminder. A book to ruin your summer, gleaming like a scarab. A book bitten down like a sandwich, a book of thorns, a book of page thirteens” — and so on for much longer than I am able to quote here, concluding with: “It was all promise and potential”. Aylett seeks to maintain that promise and potential, rather than turning it into mere actuality.
I have already mentioned Sophie Shafto, the closest THE BOOK LOVERS comes to a protagonist. Sophie is enamored of all these books. She has spent her life struggling against the limitations to which women are confined in bourgeois society: “To ignore contradictions. To faint away whenever called upon to do so. To come bending into a room in pretend modesty”. Against these social norms and expectations, Sophie craves the sheer weirdness and otherness of the written word. She treasures texts in which “despite what I want the words to say, the words are going their own way”. In this, Sophie is different from most people; the bestsellers in the world of the novel are books whose pages consist of no words, but only of mirrors, so that in reading them people can conceitedly and complacently contemplate only themselves.
In describing THE BOOK LOVERS in this way, I risk making it seem much more schematic and orderly than it in fact is. I am only quoting the passages which, atypically, I can more or less understand. The novel is multifarious, but at the same time so compressed that I can read over sentences and feel that they make perfect sense in context, even though I have no idea what they mean.
I will cut off this review here, since the only alternative would be to quote every single sentence in the course of this contemplative recapitulation. Aylett is a writer like nobody else.