Tilt [Paperback]

Scott tries to "stay detached" but is obviously troubled by the world around him, his self mutilation reflective of psychological lacerations slashed by the violence he views from his window and television. In Tilt the television is the window, and the window a mirror reflecting a world of pain and horror and abuse, from images from doorstep to global events like a twisted hall of mirrors. Seen through Scotts drug hazed eyes everything is twisted and broken. But, as Scott reminds us, "I could be wrong since I look on everything like that." Scott's world is clamped down under a heavy grey lid, casting no light but a shadowy grey sky that "seems like an infection." It is a world of little substance, a plastic junk ridden world where foreign countries are bombed almost daily on the news and used as an alternative to TV trash as a form of entertainment. Pain and porn are popular entertainment. Compassion is out the window and lying in bits in the street.

Tilt leaves a taste of junk in the mouth from Scotts McDonalds/ Pot Noodle diet to his habit of feeding only on the bad ugly aspects of humanity. Scott is as spiritually malnourished as he is physically, a victim of the "soulslaughter" of a modern "doomed youth" where reality TV and real life co-exist in a blur of distorted images, where people are images rather than flesh and bone and spirit, "cardboard cut-outs, soulless and manufactured." Scott's way of looking at it is: as long as things "look pretty cool" they are "better than real life."

But Tilt is no mere misanthropic monologue spitting at the world, more an intense examination of one sordid sick segment of it, perhaps a warning that this stain is spreading. The tone is Selby jnr black but brightened by sparks of wit and suggestions of possible redemption. For all his witty retorts and nonchalant shrugs, a heart beats under Scotts cool façade. There are also flashes of optimism. But Scott's optimism is like Gatsby's, a yearning for material wealth and status and good looks, a deluded optimism. Scott is intelligent but not wise, his world divided into extremes: the fairy tale ideal and all too real darkside of life. He see's no in-betweens. Perhaps the most tragic thing is his habit of confusing illusions of happiness with the real thing. There is a scene where he see's a fat ugly couple "frozen in acceptance." For Scott cannot accept the fact they could be happy looking like they do. Through his eyes the fat ugly couple are tragic figures who had to settle for what they could get; in fact they are probably the only glimpse of genuine happiness in the book. And a glimpse is all it is. Scotts prolonged glances are always at the horrors of violence and perversity or towards the unattainable ideal: the girl who works in McDonalds, the supermodels on his wall. Nothing ever matches up to expectation. Scott has a Morrissey-like longing and revulsion for girls, a love of ideal and hatred for the reality: as soon as warts appear in a personality Scotts illusions are shattered and he's set back again horrified and frightened by the world and conditioning himself not to care, to be "cool."

It is children who bring out the best in Scott. He see's the potential for a future in them. There is a brilliant resonant image of an unfit mother trying to mould jelly while her toddler sits in designer clothes, his mind and mouth being shaped by the mould of his environment, the attitudes and language of his parents; again the junk food/junk culture. It is through this same child, Lee, that we see Scotts façade peeled back. The smart guy wit, irony and passivity that would seem to characterize him, replaced by a caring compassionate young man, a sharp contrast to a character who has conditioned himself to laugh rather than cry at others misfortunes. There is also a glance at Scott as a child, when his mother reminds him of a story he wrote about people who are lost in the woods and have forgotten how to fly. Earlier we are told how Lee's mother threatened to leave him in a "dark forest" with goblins and monsters.

Scott is a young man lost in a dark forest, his wings clipped back as the books jacket might suggest; the silhouette an outline, a blank, a shadow . . . it is the authors talent and skill to fill Scott in with a soul, while many lesser writers would leave him one dimensional, cold, "coolly" detached

Iain Bahlaj has more in common with the likes of Joan Didion, Bret Easton Ellis and Dennis Cooper than fellow Scots Welsh and Warner. There is something of Hemingway too but with more heart; Scott is no stoic macho man, his vulnerability all too apparent, his "lost generation" stumbling in a dark forest, anaesthetized by drugs, desensitized by the brutality of the world around them and, having replaced values with vices, lost their knowledge to fly.