'The Flame Alphabet' by Ben Marcus

I first came across Ben Marcus with The Age of Wire and String, a sort of verbal photon-gun taking potshots at pretty much anything in sight, stripping the targets of their coating of familiarity. With The Flame Alphabet, Marcus seems to be taking a stride towards a more conventional novel (plot! characters!) but it’s largely in order to tread down the comforting ‘givens’ of fiction. In this book, language itself has become toxic, especially the speech of children to their parents, and Sam and Claire must decide whether to stay with the teenage daughter who is causing them harm or to abandon her and flee to a quarantine centre.  With its literalised metaphors, detailed descriptions of implausible equipment and swoops of idiotic speculation that debouche more and more meaning the sillier they get, The Flame Alphabet is the kind of book Flann O’Brien and Richard Brautigan might have written if they had got together to write a science fiction novel without ever having read one.

(June 2013)