Heart of the Original: Originality, Creativity, Individuality

by Steve Aylett

True creativity, the making of a thing which has not been in the world previously, is originality by definition. But while many claim to crave originality, they feel an obscure revulsion when confronted with it. The really new is uncomfortable and disturbing. Repetition of the familiar is preferred. The hailing of old ideas as original lowers the standard for invention and robs most creative people of the drive to do anything interesting, let alone seek out the universe of originality which is waiting, drumming its fingers, wondering why nobody calls.

This is a book for all those who care not for the fashionable simulacra of the media creative, but for an understanding of the hard road to true originality. Part manual, part history of ideas, part manifesto – this a unique experimental journey around the outer limits of our culture. It debunks myths, contradicts familiar shiboleths and wages war on cliché and platitude as it has never been waged before.

A rallying cry and disruptive book for those bored with merely thinking outside the box.

Genres: Nonfiction, Writing, Books About Books, Essays, Literary Criticism, Art

133 pages, Hardcover

First published September 10, 2015

About the author

Steve Aylett is a satirical science fiction and weird slipstream author of books such as LINT, The Book Lovers and Slaughtermatic, and comics including Hyperthick. He is known for his colourful satire attacking the manipulations of authority. Aylett is synaesthetic. He lives in Scotland.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're going to write a book banging on about the importance of originality in thought and expression, you'd better make sure it's written in a really god-damn original way. And Steve Aylett's prose is, right enough, so original that after a few pages many readers may be forgiven for thinking that that's quite enough originality for one day, thanks. Like Nabokov, but to an infinitely greater degree, Aylett creates sentences so utterly stripped of banalities and stock phrases that they almost repel: it's not so much that he is not at home to Mr Cliché, but rather that he's waiting behind the front door to garrotte Mr Cliché and bury him under the back patio. You fly over his craggy paragraphs exhausted, searching desperately for somewhere smooth enough to land. Quite often, you end up travelling somewhere else by mistake.

I said earlier that readers might be forgiven for finding it all too much, but then I am a more tolerant person than Steve Aylett, who himself shows no sympathy whatsoever for those content to recycle other people's ideas, or to consume the results with bland satisfaction. ‘While many claim to crave originality,’ he says, ‘they feel an obscure revulsion when confronted with it.’ But though he acknowledges the revulsion, he obviously thinks we should all be doing more to get over it, instead of just buying further paperbacks from writers who ‘have as much artistic ambition as a fossilized spud’.

Part of the fun of this book is seeing him get specific about this, as when he suddenly launches an unexpected attack on other writers:

In American Psycho, Ellis pretended to say what everyone knew already about consumer society, but when trying to embed what he really meant he found he didn't know whether to shoot a cake or kiss an ostrich. He gave up, leaving only the decoy, a husk which met with great success and was taken as a standard template for the modern novel. To believe it went otherwise is to accept that he was a conscious fraud. Perhaps if a book is entirely empty we shouldn't feel bad about filling it.

Even better are the pithy throwaways.

Many make do with China Mieville, quite simply one of the science fiction writers in the UK.

These things are thrown out mid-paragraph, like a knives lobbed into a crowd by a horribly committed dadaist. In the end, surveying the range of lifts, borrowings and imitations in most artistic creation, Aylett concludes with magisterial derision: ‘It's pathetic to have someone else's gut feeling.’

True originality, by contrast, ‘increases the options, not merely the products’. He does touch on a few writers that he seems to admire (Tove Jansson, Greg Egan and – bafflingly to me – Michael Moorcock are all mentioned with approbation), and enjoins readers to ‘be ravenous’ in order to dig out their own gems. ‘Real creativity is a ferocity of consciousness,’ he suggests, and for him this begins at the level of individual word choice, which gets an attention that I found particularly gratifying.

Words have the device-like detailed architecture of diatoms, and a glowing soul. A word will present itself as armatured with potential, as though with arms open, calling via your intuition to another word in another environment. You can enrich the stuff of life by bringing together two words which have never, ever been introduced to one another before. Perhaps because they dwell in different contexts or in the jargon of different disciplines, they are never held in the attention at the same time. Yet when put together, their cogs mesh as if they were made for each other and a massive amount of energy is released.

Any Aylett sentence will provide examples of such unexpected and productive collocations – as, for instance, when he describes Antonin Artaud as having ‘a face like a wet kestrel’, or when he writes that ‘A system is never so good that it couldn't be improved by a hen on a rampage’. In fact one of the surprises of Heart of the Original is just how practical some of the advice in here is, despite its quasi-parodic clothing. I loved this:

I was doing a story about a childhood visit to the circus and wrote ‘They pounced, two clowns holding me by the arms while a fourth beat the bejesus out of me.’ I found this mistake of the missing third clown very funny but didn't know why. When the mind has to jump a gap, the spark it fires can tickle the brain's surface or ignite unused pathways, depending on the guidelines placed on either side.

The book is itself a demonstration of the technique, compressed and elided at times to the point of incomprehensibility but frequently exhilarating anyway. He refers in passing, for instance, to Jesus' ‘suicide-by-cop’, or writes of creative expression that ‘It leaves you raw enough to feel your reflection granulate across a mirror's surface’.

Somewhere beyond the literary ectopia characterising Aylett's writing, there is – perhaps surprisingly – a core of real emotion and belief which in lazy shorthand you might call political. In this book, it's especially exhilarating because it's not just about other artists and how they should be assessed, it's also about how you can think and feel and react more creatively yourself. The consequences of this go beyond the world of the arts and soak into almost everything else. As Aylett cautions, ‘You may even live a life with repercussions.’

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

One day at work, I opened my mail and this book was in it. I received it without request from the author.

It is deceptively short, packed densely with interesting examinations of ideas related to creativity and originality. While this won't be for everyone, if you enjoy a deep dive into philosophy where most of the examples are literary (heavy on science fiction examples), you will enjoy this. I did!

[Jay Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found myself wanting to highlight every sentence in this book. A tour de force that exemplifies creativity and originality at the same time as it explores those very same topics. Alan Moore has it right: "Force-fed with ideas until its liver explodes, this staggeringly brilliant book has scarcely a line in it that won’t make you wish you’d thought of it first."

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

An example of how I choose what to read next from my book pile: the cover of ‘Heart of the Original’ was visually appealing and matched my hair (freshly dip-dyed green) and dress (purple). Prioritising books once I’ve borrowed them from the library always requires arbitrary choices. I initially searched out ‘Heart of the Original’, however, because Steve Aylett is the funniest writer I have ever read. I recommend Lint in particular and also the Only an Alligator series, which I intend to re-read when I can get hold of them once more. This is his first nonfiction book, written in just the same inimitable style as previous fiction. Said style is hard to describe, so I will quote some parts I liked.

On new ideas:

Combined with the historic policy of ignoring the first instance of any particular idea until it has spread enough to be restated generally, these approaches minimise the uncomfortable notion that an idea can originate from an individual. It’s less disturbing to have a spider climb into your mouth than to have one climb out.

On words:

Words have the device-like detailed architecture of diatoms, and a glowing soul. A word will present itself as armatured with potential, as though with arms open, calling via your intuition to another word in another environment. You can enrich the stuff of life by bringing together two words which have never, ever been introduced to one another before.

On Solon:

The relatively reasonable Greek statesman Solon let himself down by making it a crime to publicly express political neutrality and also a crime to publicly speak ill of the living or dead, in the great tradition of combinatory laws that do not allow people to quite exist.

On science fiction:

[Jules] Verne’s editor rejected the book, saying nobody would believe that fax machines could ever exist or waiters could ever be so rude. By the time the manuscript was rediscovered in 1989, reality had surpassed Verne’s vision and the average capital city was a 24/7 apocalypse unsuited to sentient life.

On dreams:

During sleep we do not work or consume, are not outward-looking, hysterical or entertaining, and are becoming healthier. Many would wish it abolished, in others. Remember, if you pick up a strange book in a dream and read it, it’s your copyright. But such books are notoriously difficult to bring back whole.

That last is apposite because last night I distinctly remember dreaming three novels on a table, the titles and authors of which I read but cannot for the life of me now recall. Except that one was by George RR Martin, but was nothing to do with Game of Thrones.

From the above, you likely have very little idea of what ‘Heart of the Original’ is actually about. The book itself isn’t inclined to be proscriptive on that point. Aylett is essentially giving the reader, often addressed in the second person, a pep talk on their ability to have new ideas and create original art. Although the specific themes behind each chapter remain relatively mysterious, the whole is somehow cheering and uplifting, or at least it was to me. Aylett is complaining about unoriginal writing, but in such an odd fashion that it avoids seeming mean-spirited. His surreal style remains very entertaining outside fiction, although it shrouds everything he writes in uncertainty as to its level of fictitiousness. (Lint, his masterwork in my opinion, really commits to its status as a po-faced biography, despite chapter titles like ‘The Man Who Gave Birth to His Arse’.) This small, beautifully presented book is a pleasant moment of strangeness that I definitely recommend.

[G. Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

In order to understand The Heart of the Original we must first attempt to understand its author, Steve Aylett, but we find this is impossible for several reasons. Aylett is almost as mysterious as he is brilliant. Great portions of his history have been erased from the universe. One thing seems clear: Aylett was created in the core of a pulsar by an alien god who hates pasta. Was he reared for the special purpose of creating amazing works of non-fiction such as The Heart of the Original? There is certainly no way to be sure. This realization sends readers into various stages of grief, mania, dejection, exhilaration, apoplexy—in that order. I am currently stricken with a sort of aphasia that causes my fingers to produce book reviews without my frontal lobe being aware that I am typing on my laptop. I will even edit this without realizing what I am doing. My conscious mind is picturing kittens and butterflies, all naked. Left with no way to understand the creator, we must turn to examining his creation.


The Heart of the Original explores where we are at as a culture—The Entire West and points elsewhere. It is not really a love letter to creativity, but a disappointment letter to humanity. Lamentations, one of the funniest books of the Bible, is to The Heart of the Original what Revelation is to, I don’t know, House of Leaves. People will forever be calling Aylett the “Nicolae Ceaușescu of how to write things” because there is nothing in this book that is not written above and beyond the call of duty. Anything included was polished by the wings of tiny, naked boy angles and anything left unwritten was clearly unwritable. The last time I read something of this caliber was when I read this very book—make no mistake, this is something that has no peer in modern literature. I literarily have no idea where it should even be classified. Satiric non-fiction? Absurdist text book for the mentally aberrant artist? Whatever the libraries decide will be fine by me, but on my home shelf, I’m putting it right between my brain and my heart where really good books go.

[Alex Sarll]

Noting that our culture always talks about prizing fresh thinking, while acclaim and success in fact go to the comfortably dilute and familiar, the reliably awkward author of Lint offers a hilarious, thought-provoking treatise on what originality is, how to do it, and above all how to get away with it. It's equal parts genuine creative manifesto and a piss-take of the nonsense you find in manifestoes, often at the same time. When he discusses primitive man, for instance, and how in cave art "Woolly mammoths are often depicted as being appalled to a standstill...Fossil evidence suggests that early hominids had reinforced cheekbones to withstand being frequently punched in the face, and no wonder"...it's a mockery of ev-psych bollocks in the sort of books would-be-managers read, for sure, but doesn't it also contain a sublime truth? And even when Aylett is maddeningly subjective or outright wrong, well, he notes that sometimes you can deliberately construct an argument with a hole in it, the hole thereby exercising strange gravitational powers - and heavens protect us from more books with which we quietly agree. More often he is at least very funny and frequently brilliant with it: it seemed absurd on the page, but he's quite correct about how hard it is to picture yourself facing in the opposite direction.

(An aside on economics: I do worry sometimes about the business model of this book's publishers, Unbound. I signed up for them to back John Moore's novel - the one crowdfunding project I have ever backed which has not reached its target, so I got my money back. But through being on their register from that, I have also ended up with three free £10 pledges. Which only ever gets you an ebook, this among them, and clearly ebooks have minimal unit costs, but still - they have essentially given me thirty quid for nowt. About which I can hardly complain, but I hope such generosity doesn't become a problem for them)

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Punchy!

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJE-L...

[Philippe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this book was an enervating experience. Postmodernist manifesto or irreverent prank? Most of the time, I couldn’t make head nor tails of it. But the crumb trail of brilliant one-liners, bizarre factoids and pointers to offbeat authors kept me going. Certainly, there is a place for this kind of book, “ … a book like an alien fruit, a book like a rack of honeycomb, a book like a cognitive cathedral, a book that behaves like a liquid but explodes like a solid, a book that has pops and scratches like an old vinyl record, a book with tiny hook teeth, a stroboscopic book like an ocean species, a book that reconfigures between readings, a book of fused glass strata, (…) designed to overtask the rational mind to the point where it relents, leaving instinct to watch their colorful play of symbolic recurrencies”. Only too bad it didn’t give me consistent “dog-in-a-sidecar” pleasure to read it. But I will certainly return on a regular basis to the vast and brilliant collection of Kindle highlights that accumulated during this wonky ride.

“The fear of intensity that comes with real creativity, the house tornado in which intermeshing components roll and radiate in collisions of velocitous bliss, is pretty good gauge of your final creation’s power. Heaven is hard to be around. Put the reader in the nosecone of the rocket."

[Rob Adey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A terrifyingly high proportion of good sentences. I've got three pages of references to follow up from this.

[Simon P · Rating 1 out of 5]

I liked parts of this book, the parts that are like absurdist self-help for writers. It's certainly interesting.

Or is it? It might be an odd, angry text that doesn't really say anything except "I don't find many media to be that unique or interesting"? Fair enough if that's your perspective, but without a cogent argument to support that assertion and more importantly without an alternative, all we really have is an absurdist whine.

The premise of the book, that only truly original thoughts and works have value, is impossible and completely meaningless. It's one thing to say that media are repetitive, another entirely to dismiss art and design completely, unless it's so "out there" it can't be understood. When we write a story, we borrow language, we use experience we could only have had interacting with other people and existing things. To say otherwise is psychotic.
Mark Twain - "When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his."


Perhaps Aylett is a genius because I couldn't understand or support the point he was making most of the time -
Wittgenstein: "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him."
Or perhaps his view is just snobbish bollocks. You know what, I am saddened by a lot of TV shows, books, movies, because of their lack of authenticity and originality; but some TV shows, books and movies are amazing. And finding the good makes enduring the bad worthwhile.

Overall, this book sounds like the unhinged cries of a shackled right-brain hemisphere desperate for freedom. Some of it is interesting, but ultimately pointless, and stringing random words together does not constitute poetic genius.

Perhaps I'm not "creative" or "original" enough to get it, but probably it's a book that promised an insight into creativity and delivered random-word juxtaposition and belligerence.

[Luke Pete · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alan Moore’s jacket quote superlatives the "raising the bar" expression, saying this book is endangering migrating birds. And he is right. Aylett, of course, attacks the very idea of the bar, effusing and honeycombing it, distending and dripping it, redefining it— a watering hole, a unit of chocolate, a Browning Automatic Rifle— among other things within his salvo/meditation that is this book. It's absurdly good and power-packed. John Mitchinson called it a hand grenade on his podcast, Backlisted, and Mitch was the one with the bright idea to publish Aylett's first non-fiction book in the first place. In addition to being a brash work of criticism, the book is also a road map for understanding the world. After reading it I felt as if anything could (or everything must) be viewed in its wake (here again, another tired cliche; think the Agnes Varda film; or poor Spaulding Grey leaping off the boat; and on and on). He shreds metaphor, religion (the hilarious marzipan badger line), government (and its exploitation of disaster), ideology (most of which he traces back to find its absolutely unoriginal), and other labels for ideas and rewires our understanding of them. He celebrates the true original in a wild, sci-fi-esque ending flourish, too.

So: is it even possible to find an escape route? Is there a lot of merit in peering deeply into the last place you look? Is the banal actually a trompe l'oeil? Should it be one? Are those we most taxonomize: the archetypes, restricted, censored, incarcerated; are they the ones who actually end up being the most original or is this itself as unorigional as it appears to be? And does anyone care? Does Aylett care, as he peers through the dark tinted glasses in leather jacket with a maybe-cloying smidge of a smirk upon his face? Indeed.

[vicalicalic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only not 5 stars because have to keep putting down my copy to look up everyone and everything he covers 😂

[Жанна Пояркова]

Айлетт душнит, словно студент, прочитавший первый томик дада и ругающий всех за отсутствие оригинальности, но с уже почти старческой желчностью. Айлетт прав ("Земля кишит бескрылыми птицами, которые разговаривают чужими словами"), но за прошедшие годы он, похоже, не слишком изменился, так что свежего ему сказать особо нечего. Но несколько звездных цитат тут, конечно, найдется.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Storytellers tend to neuter trickster figures for longer works. Wu Cheng ’en tied Monkey to a boring priest for his Journey to the West, fearing that the adventures of Monkey unbound would lack a structure people would recognise. The super-conservative Marvel movies rewrote Loki as a villain so clueless his greatest achievement was to make the Hulk seem interesting. A life or text in which every link is spelled out will be expunged of mischief, leaving no task to the mind. We are left with countless accounts of reactive remnants and records of mitigation, shrivelled from the get-go. It’s such an effort for ear-breathers to get their heads around trickster behaviour that they lazily short-hand it as zany and hyper, and thus in accord with a world of scared extroverts. But the real thing is the least hysterical in the room.

I've never read Steve Aylett and my experience with "books about writing" by writers I haven't read has been very hit or miss. Sometimes I come away thinking I have to read more by this person (thank you, Jane Smiley) and sometimes I come away thinking I never want to read anything else by this person (fuck you, Francine Prose).

I am undecided about Steve Aylett.

Heart of the Original is a manifesto, a screed, an elevator-drop ride through genre fiction, alternately trashing and praising everything from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to H.P. Lovecraft. It begins with a series of bold statements about "originality" (namely, that most people don't want it and even fewer have it).

Before the satirist Bierce threw his phone into the furnace he talked about ‘our resolutely stalled evolution’. A great one for affable scorn, he was admired to within an inch of his life. Like Twain, he had noticed that giving the same argument while wearing different trousers gave the illusion of varied insight. Those who claim that there are no more first times refuse to state when the last-ever ‘first time’ occurred. When did it all end? Others hold up old ideas in new clobber and claim originality. Anything to avoid creating the real thing. Combined with the historic policy of ignoring the first instance of any particular idea until it has spread enough to be restated generally, these approaches minimise the uncomfortable notion that an idea can originate from an individual. It’s less disturbing to have a spider climb into your mouth than to have one climb out.

True creativity, the making of a thing which has not been in the world previously, is originality by definition. It increases the options, not merely the products. But while many claim to crave originality, they feel an obscure revulsion when confronted with it. They have no receptor point to plug it into. Attempts to force it result in the sort of fire that burned Tesla’s wonder-lab to the ground. Repetition of familiar forms is preferred. The hailing of old notions as original lowers the standard for invention and robs most creative people of the drive to do anything interesting, let alone seek out the universe of originality which is waiting, drumming its fingers and wondering why nobody calls.

Raw thought is more available to those not stuck to the temporal floor. Thousands of ‘what if the Nazis won WW2’ stories are hailed as innovative despite the first appearing in 1937. In the mid-thirties Katharine Burdekin knew the allies would win the upcoming war but wrote a thought-experiment about the alternative, Swastika Night, published the year Ayn Rand was busy plagiarizing Zamyatin’s We. Randolph Bourne was one of the few journalists to suggest the First World War might not be such a bright idea and annoyed everyone by calling it ‘the First World War’. It was supposed to be called the Great War or the War to End All Wars. Bourne was ignored because his opinion disturbed the narrative and because he was disabled. Another such figure was Simone Weil, the sort of goofy genius who’d fire all minds at a posh dinner and end up tucking the tablecloth into her pants and dragging everything to the floor.

This book is packed with these sorts of observations, this sort of prose, streaming from chapter to chapter at such volume that it took me a while to grasp Aylett's thesis. For starters, it is the (unoriginal) observation that almost every work of fiction is copying something else. So what, then, is originality? This Aylett never precisely defines (is it something that can be precisely defined?) but he seems to be making an effort to demonstrate it. Sometimes I wondered what drugs he takes while writing.

Real creativity is a ferocity of consciousness. It can be as small as the firestarter spark produced by those two words that have never been next to each other before or as stomach-rolling as translating yourself sideways into adjacent dimensions, a nearly-simple rotation of the soul which leaves you radiant with scorn and the precocious levels of seemingly casual opting-out only previously achievable on a framework of pumped, high-tensile resentment. You may even live a life with repercussions.

Paragraph after paragraph like this resembles something both brilliant and original, but also wears on the reader. Does his fiction look like this? I'm curious to find out.

Aylett, like many critical and cynical writers, has an expansive knowledge of literary and genre history, and when he's not ranting creatively about creativity, he's name-checking one work after another, from the obscure to the pop.

But those who fear originality – or fear the results if they try for it – flop on the chicken-bone pillow of the tried, deciding that the best we can do is refine the design. As far as I know, no profits from The Hunger Games went to Koushun Takami, or from Inception to Yasutaka Tsutsui. Will Banksy pay a fee to Arofish? These sloppy Trelawneys save the body and leave the heart, the mischief and moral centre that powered it. Without such a centre, satire can work for a little while like a squid valve, propelled by what it casts behind, but without direction. If Mark Leyner’s candy assortments were put at the service of something, he would have wrong-footed readers rather than allow them to get his zany number with no surprises. 

In American Psycho, Ellis pretended to say what everyone knew already about consumer society, but when trying to embed what he really meant he found he didn’t know whether to shoot a cake or kiss an ostrich. He gave up, leaving only the decoy, a husk which met with great success and was taken as a standard template for the modern novel. To believe it went otherwise is to accept that he was a conscious fraud. Perhaps if a book is entirely empty we shouldn’t feel bad about filling it. 

There can be wheel-spinning fun in taking the style of a previous work and outstripping its content. The first rule of Fight Club – you do not talk about The Day Philosophy Dies. Carlton Mellick III collected a tissue sample from the body-horror portion of Burroughs’ schtick and grew it into a gutty and glistening career, atop which his own chin projected like a keep. Kafka was painstakingly checking that every single word he wrote was turned in the same direction long before he took Little Dorrit’s Circumlocution Office and made it his own. His inevitability machines sometimes filled him with a fiendish glee and when he read his work aloud to friends he was often helpless with laughter. It takes stamina to make a book with one flavour all the way across like a ceramic brick wall.

I was left with a considerable list of works I am interesting in checking out, and a curiosity about Aylett's own "slipstream" fiction, but I don't think Heart of the Original is meant to "inspire" writers so much as make them think, like a double-tap to the noggin. This book was intriguing enough that I bookmarked many passages, yet I didn't exactly enjoy it, as I felt, as I often do in more "experimental" works, that I was being subjected to the author's writing kinks. But it's something kind of out there and different from your run-of-the-mill authorial musings.

[Ian Mond]

Opaque. Fascinating. Laugh out loud funny. That sums up my thoughts on Heart of the Original. Aylett’s short treatise on originality argues that there is nothing new under the sun and that, typically, new ideas lie fallow for decades. If I learnt anything from the book, timing is the key to any innovation. Get in too early, and you’re laughed at, only to die unloved while generations later, some other bloke, stumbling across your work, revives the concept and gets all the plaudits. Aylett is terrific. He can be both pretentious, befuddling and hilarious in a single paragraph. And he clearly has a polymath's understanding of the world that, I’ll be honest, I found a bit intimidating. I’ve known Aylett’s fiction for years but never picked up his work. I should probably address that.

[Carolyn Drake · Rating 3 out of 5]

An entertaining, cruel, misanthropic, cutting, imaginative manifesto extolling the virtues of true creativity and orginality whilst giving a right good kicking to tropes, clichés and some big literary names along the way. I'm struggling with how to describe this book - I gave up highlighting parts of this on my Kindle; it's bursting at the seams with scalpel-carved lines of wit that became somewhat overwhelming. And I have no idea if the author means any of it.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

🤯

[Tom De Ville · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary surge of pure inspiration.

[Paul Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Annoying, truculent, vivid, inspiring, exasperating, wilfully obscure, insightful and true. All at once. I suspect this book will take a lifetime to digest, and even then...

[Mark Harding · Rating 4 out of 5]

Still digesting this one.