Earlier I wrote about a book I wish I’d read when I was 16. Here’s one I wish I’d read when I was 10: The Adventures of Endill Swift, by Stuart McDonald. This is surreal children’s literature in the tradition of Roald Dahl and Lewis Carroll. Endill Swift is trapped at Epitaph School, a gruesome place with sadistic teachers, labyrinthine corridors you can lose yourself in for years, a dining room where rows of animal heads grin down at frightened students, and dormitories named after weeds and insects. The library is so huge it has its own abominable bookman, living somewhere far above the floor. Endill wants to escape before the school drives him mad, like it once did his father and grandfather, and clearly also has done to the teachers, who even when they retire don’t leave the school island, but go off to wander the uncharted corridors, sad and confused.

It’s all done in the clear, intelligent and witty style of the best children’s books. There’s also plenty of satire aimed at adult readers, and it’s really up to you if you want to read Endill Swift as a book for children, or a book for adults about childhood. It’s brilliant either way, (and if it all sounds too dark for children to read then you’ve forgotten what it was like.) It’s also out of print and virtually forgotten, something that happens to a frightening number of potential classics.

When Thomas M. Disch killed himself this summer, obituaries said he was the kind of brilliant critic’s favourite that readers ignore. After reading On Wings of Song, I see why he was admired, but also why he wasn’t read. How do you describe a novel where the only escape from religious conformism and economic depression is to sing so earnestly that your inner invisible fairy flies out of your body in a state of mystical bliss, and not make it sound silly? I sure don’t know how. I guess you have to take me on trust when I say that this bleak and quiet satire isn’t silly or funny, and definitely not blissful. Anything good in its world is shown only as an unreachable goal that adds to the bitterness of the life of Daniel Weinreb. The near-future America he lives in is falling apart, (quietly, in the background), and it’s taking him down with it, coloring him with its hypocrisy. Daniel is not an anti-hero, he seems always at the verge of success, earnestly wanting to live well, and that makes his failures more bitter. It’s the moderation I admire in this novel, the way Disch creates a feeling of a world ending, (as well as a feeling that it deserves to), without piling on with tragic horrors. Not a happy novel, this, not at all. I liked it, and I think I recommend it, but neither that nor his lit fic respectability will bring crowds of readers to Thomas M. Disch any time soon.

“As for Tolkien, I think those movies came along at a time when people would do almost anything to avoid thinking clearly about what is actually going on, and it was good homogenous escapism. I liked Liv Tyler’s mouth, and I think all three movies should have been just a close-up of that.”
- Steve Aylett

“Satire works in a bunch of specific ways, like a very precisely-geared bomb. It’s a bit like something that looks harmless, and you swallow it, but once it’s inside you it’s too late, and it triggers, blowing up. And it’s your specific inner beliefs and faulty arguments that trigger a satire bomb. If your arguments work, the bomb doesn’t trigger, it doesn’t need to.”
- Steve Aylett

“I would hope that [death is] just the end – I’d feel really cheated if I was woken up into another realm and had a load more shit to deal with. I really just want it finished.”
- Steve Aylett

“It’s a shame, sort of a waste, that most people are influenced by what the newspaper supplements tell them is the book they are meant to be seen reading this year. It seems like those people aren’t really interested in books. If you’re really into books, you havoc all over the place picking up disparate stuff which you devour hungrily, and the ‘selection’ process is more like a sixth sense hunger, a billion miles away from fashion.”
- Steve Aylett

I reviewed his Slaughtermatic earlier, and I’ll be back for more.