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| The search for perfection? |
Such a concept as this may have been doomed from the start, destined never to have been fully and accurately realised. From personal experience, the stuff that resides in the head rarely survives the transition from thought to word – hence the struggle to successfully find backers for my Dirty Despot trading cards – and in Mellick’s story of the futility and indeed folly of the pursuit of perfection, the prose is clumsy and awkward, the ideas beautiful and disturbing but uncomfortably chopped and fitted rather than allowed to smear sticky fluids across the page as they might wish, and although it ends on the up, the general reaction may more likely be one of disappointment than euphoria (and vomiting). Supremely ironically, and acknowledged in the introduction, the twiddling and fiddling over 8 years between conception and publication, has deprived Mellick’s fable of its joie de vivre and left instead a somewhat mechanical novel, the joys of the flesh removed and replaced by something artificial. Fitting, you might say, but still irritating.
(I'd love to put a paid link here but fuck me if I can find anywhere that still sells this shit.)
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