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The Velocity Gospel: Accomplice Book Two
by Steve Aylett
(Gollancz, £9.99, 131 pages, trade paperback, published 31 May 2002;
ISBN 0-57507-088-9. Gollancz, £6.99, 131 pages, mass market paperback,
published January 2003.)
You have to be in the right mood for Steve Aylett's quirky fiction.
If you're feeling bright and breezy then something like, say, The
Velocity Gospel can seem interestingly different, funny and demanding.
If you've got a bit of a hangover or you're just a little tired then
the same book can seem pretentious, nonsensical and obstreperously difficult.
So, allowing for me having been in the right frame of mind whilst
reading The Velocity Gospel, I quite enjoyed it. The further
adventures of Barny Juno and friends were almost as entertaining as
previously -- and is it my imagination imposing some order on Aylett's
warped world or is there some measure of political satire in here? Talking
of his voters and the need to keep them occupied with anything but politics,
Mayor Rudloe cynically suggests: "Convince them they prosper through
witnessing prosperity" (page 63). Surely Aylett wouldn't let reality
intrude into Accomplice, would he?
Anyway, the plot... well, Barny is unaware of being once more pursued
by an emissary of the demon king Sweeny -- to be fair he has other things
on his mind, like trying to break up with his present girlfriend, Magenta
Blaze, for new love Chloe Low. All the familiar bizarre characters from
Only An Alligator reprise their original performances: Barny's
curmudgeonly parents, the chef school (motto: 'Garbage, at crippling
prices!') and his perhaps-not-as-bizarre-as-it-first-appears job at
the sorting office where nobody has a clue what to do with the parcels
that continually arrive. I've had jobs like that, too.
However, the nagging riptide of doubt sucking the sands of enjoyment
away from between my toes was that, postmodern arguments for the value
or relevance of literature aside, I can't quite see the point of the
Accomplice series. Well, that's perhaps a bit harsh; let's say,
rather, that I can't understand what Aylett is hoping to achieve here.
The ratio of effort to reward is unbalanced in The Velocity Gospel.
This is not an easy bedtime read, but given its difficulty, or
rather, perhaps, its perplexity (if that's a legitimate term of literary
criticism), there seems to be little real depth here. Once you've finished
you can put it aside without a second thought. And, even more disastrously
for the second in a four part series, I have no great urge to read part
three...
Quite good, but in slightly bad kind of way.
Review by Stuart Carter
www.stupc.co.uk
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