Karloff's Circus

Accomplice #4

by Steve Aylett

As an era of Accomplice history comes to a close, the Circus of the Heart’s Shell transforms the town square into a venue for hellish clowning. Sweeney’s forces are closing in on Barny from several directions.

But is Dietrich right that humanity is more routinely evil than any mythical fright?

Will Fang be re-united with his zombie family?

What does doomed Eddie Gallo find outside Accomplice?

Will Gregor survive a boxing match with a slob demon?

Genres: Bizarro Fiction, Fiction, Humor, Science Fiction

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

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]

In the final Accomplice book the baddies meet a sticky end and so, unfortunately, do many of the goodies. A darker tone in general predominates here, as the town is taken over by a travelling circus filled with the kind of terrifying clowns that make Pennywise look like a welcome addition to your daughter's bat mitzvah. You'll need to throw more than a bucket of glitter to sort this lot out.

Impressively, the chaos of Aylett's writing resolves here into something much better-planned than we had any reason to suspect – throwaway jokes and minor absurdities from the beginning of the series here come together in an accumulation of call-backs that assemble into something remarkably coherent. The whole sequence takes on the appearance of a puzzle-box, with clues scattered throughout, pointing to something portentous about what Accomplice is and how it relates to our own reality. If, as Aylett nudges,

Lucifer is a black glove we wear to hide our fingerprints

then what are we to think of all the demons in these books? They certainly have nothing on the run-of-the-mill human evils deployed by the Mayor and his shadowy masters. ‘Government,’ Aylett deadpans, ‘is like domestic abuse – it manages to make the victim feel guilty.’ As for poor Barny Juno and ‘his core audience of affronted bastards’, things are quickly coming apart – literally, in the case of Barny, whose house is disintegrating around him, leaving his menagerie of adopted animals milling around uncorralled:

Crowded species were flowing together, mates and foes mixed as though crayoned by a kid, wed in tooth and claw like saints beyond nameable colour.

One can only hope Steve Aylett is on drugs, otherwise you have to assume he's one side or the other of a serious breakdown. He makes his kaleidoscopic view of reality work for him, though, so that when he does let one of his epigrams fly (‘Work keeps you occupied during the period of your life when you might be achieving something’) it slams home with real force. This is a fittingly apocalyptic climax to a visceral, sui-generic and very funny series.

[severyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've still no idea what the plot was, but I can't argue with lines like:

'"A good leg will know when to kick, know when to run, and handle the transition quickly."'

'"I'm reluctant to characterise it as a fight at all," remarked Karloff. "It was more like a sort of decision against the other fellow's existence."'

'"You upper classes - so at home in a vacuum you can find three syllables in it. Bite into doubt, you'll find good reason. You'll end undone and sliding down bath mirror steam..."'

'A girl pure as snake oil walked past, tattooed around every inch with curlicue ciphers: 'I will organise my faults so that I resemble a public servant' disappeared into her cleavage and emerged 'proud to death' across her belly.'

[Harry · Rating 5 out of 5]

...and so my first read-through of Aylett's Accomplice quadrilogy comes to an end. What a ride!

Steve Aylett is quite simply one of the most original, creative, off-the-wall artists I've ever come across. I'm hooked. I'm in my mid-to-late 30s and it's rare for me to come across something truly new and excitingthese days, but Aylett makes me feel like I'm a teenager again, experiencing that rush of stumbling across an amazing new band.

Aylett is not afraid to take risks, running roughshod over conventions of form, plot, character development. He has an uncanny ability to dip into his literary pockets and pull out rich handfuls of bizarre, smart, audacious sentences. At first glance his prose might resemble a stream of consciousness, but look closer and notice the incredible care and attention to detail he lavishes on every single sentence, jam-packed as every paragraph is with wit, visual flair and brilliant ideas. There's real depth and profundity here too, beneath the colourful comic book capers.

Aylett never relies on lazy cultural references, tired structural tricks, the same old worn tropes. He is a master of world building from the ground up. Little of the world he crafts and populates bears any resemblance to anything else you've encountered, which makes his writing feel fresh and alive. By the fourth book, you as a reader are perfectly accepting of and familiar with stuff like floor lobsters and Jonathan glasses. Accomplice sucks you in and makes you feel right at home amid the chaos.

Aylett's work is a breath of fresh air, the likes of which I haven't experienced since Reeves & Mortimer burst out of nowhere and into my childhood, getting me hooked on their surrealist, absurdist comedy which was unlike anything I'd seen before.

This forth book is just as brilliant and unique as the others, though the ending was unexpectedly dark and left me feeling really sad.

********

SPOILERS AHOY!

Stop reading here if you haven't finished this book. I mean it. What follows is my immediate thoughts upon completion, which I may add to at a later date once it's sat with me for a while.

********

OK, so throughout the series the loose plot's direction of travel seemed to be towards a happy ending for Barney Juno, the oblivious simpleton whose only wish is to care for the winged and stepping creatures of the earth. It's taken as a given that the prophecies delivered by the philosopher Bingo Violaine at the time of his death show Barney to be the story's 'chosen one', here to kick evil's butt (if unwittingly). Throughout the Accomplice series his innocence and purity of intent seem to endow him with 100% bulletproof plot armour when it comes to the nefarious machinations of the demon Sweeney and mayor Rudloe. Up until near the end of this final installment, it seems he is going to come up smelling of roses; as usual, dumb luck or fate are on his side in the form of absurdist deus ex machinae which allow him to get the best of Karloff. First he wins his bet on the boxing match (an incredible scene, by the way) and takes custody of the circus' animals, then Karloff is mashed by the reintegration of Beltane Carom and Prancer Diego at the very moment he's about to assassinate Juno with the Wesley Kern gun.

At that stage I was fully expecting Barney and his animals to emerge victorious and live happily ever after. In an unexpectedly cruel twist, it isn't to be. Instead, Aylett turns the darkness dial up to 11.

As things wind down, Barney finally takes the advice of his ex girlfriend Chloe Low, who has repeatedly badgered him about doing his civic duty and urged him to think of his fellow citizens instead of animals for once. Swayed by her influence, he goes to donate blood, as all Accomplice residents are meant to do each year on the pretext of filling the town's blood clock. He dies when the extraction machine keeps going and leaves him a shriveled husk.

The blood clock, of course, is just a front. The blood is all destined for the Conglomerate, an oligarchic conjoined hivemind mass that rules Accomplice from the shadows via the complicity of useful idiots like Rudloe. The curtain is lifted and the grotesque inner workings of Accomplice are revealed. Turns out it's not the loud, colourful, officious mid-level bad guys you need to worry about; it's their faceless, emotionless overlords who are the real nightmare. In hell, the demon Sweeney has an epiphany, realising that what goes on behind the scenes in Accomplice is far worse than the zany and ineffectual antics of his coterie of demons. The Conglomerate is pure concentrated evil, with no funny side in sight. Violaine's prophecies turn out to have just been defiance in the face of his imminent death. There is no fate, no karma, no happy ending for those who deserve it, and Violaine's narrator-ghost finally tires of the story and melts away.

The sudden lurch in tone really struck me like a hammerblow after the off-kilter, dark-but-funny comicbook fairytale kookiness that was the signature tone of the Accomplice series. In the end, after Barney's death it becomes pretty bleak and positively Yeatsian; Aylett seems to actively invoke The Second Coming with the Conglomerate's talk of the centre not needing to hold, because there never was a centre. The monstrous new blackness that emerges from Sweeney's throne chilled me in the same way as Yeats' rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem.

I was left feeling utterly devastated in a way that curiously brought to mind my first time watching Blackadder Goes Forth as a child. That final sequence as they prepare to go over the top, where suddenly all the witty humour comes to an abrupt end and the laughter track stops. Silence falls, as the guns stop. Is the war over? Sadly, no. The pantomime villain who has tormented Blackadder throughout - the hapless Captain Darling - fails to be saved by his last-gasp begging to Lord Melchitt and is revealed as just another vulnerable, frightened human, about to die in a senseless war which he never wanted any part of. The real enemies are implicitly revealed as the absent leaders and generals who allowed it all to happen in the first place.

I digress. Back to Karloff's Circus. The animals departing on EH Hunt's ark-like boat constructed from the remnants of Barney's house is a poignant and fittingly absurd end to the story, though I was left devastated and feeling like the happy ending might have served me better in these dark times.

Aylett's Accomplice has thoroughly wormed its way into my mind and will undoubtedly sit with me for a long time to come. I will definitely reread these bizarre, unique books again in the future.

[Hokomoko · Rating 3 out of 5]

This did less for me than the other Accomplice books - as it wound down instead of winding everywhere. Aylett writes with aphorisms leading to spasms of action, often so dense I read them twice then a third time with my eyes closed. Almost 4*s - if only something remained after this.