Headfuckery

There's an articulate tribute to Steven Aylett's Lint over on Ultraculture that explains far better than I ever could the attraction of Aylett's work. I'm still marginally more disposed towards the Goth-punk excess that is Bigot Hall than Lint, but it runs it a close second.

As Eli Lee, the author of the Ultraculture piece, explains:

... Lint is meant to be baffling. And although it might not come across in these out-of-context extracts, it’s also brilliantly funny. I’d go as far to say that its tone, full of stupid jokes and ridiculous ideas, is reminiscent of Woody Allen’s short stories – praise indeed. Even though it sometimes falls flat, it’s got such a high hit rate that it’s still one of the funniest books around.

Aylett calls his work old-fashioned Voltairean satire, which doesn’t entirely match my reading of Lint(though perhaps it’s true for his other novels). With his protagonist bent on creating a preposterous, idiosyncratic world that runs parallel to – and is never accepted by – consensus reality, Aylett doesn’t seem to be making the classic Voltairean point about human weakness and hypocrisy. Instead, he seems to be suggesting that most of us are criminally unimaginative. But Lint offsets this. It offers an antidote. It does so to the point that it becomes almost talismanic in its concentration of excessive imagination.

If you can handle its weirdness – even better if you like it – you’ll see this. You’ll get that it’s something special; a rare piece of art in which an imagination runs wild, and in so doing mercifully evades the exigencies of the banal – so ingrained in most of us that we’re likely only to read a page or two before we put it down in disorientation and distaste. For those who do the opposite, Lint is something to cherish.

Indeed.