Man-Eating Typewriter by Richard Milward review – homage to 60s gay counterculture

Studded with Polari, this bold novel is a dazzling entertainment of sexual and linguistic transgression

This bold chunk of fiction comes garlanded with the promise that it is written in Polari, the historical cant of British gay male society. This turns out to be not quite true – Polari was only ever a vocabulary, rather than a full language – but it certainly indicates where we’re heading; back to the late 1960s, when Polari had its heyday, and far out into the choppy waters of linguistic transgression.

The largest part of the book is taken up with what purports to be a typescript of the “anarcho-surrealist” memoirs of one Raymond Novak. The tersest summary of Novak’s literary stylings might be to say that Julian and Sandy, those Polari-dishing stars of Round the Horne, meet Bataille and Breton – and lose. Other antecedents include the slang that Anthony Burgess invented for the droogs of A Clockwork Orange, and the potty-mouthed wordplay of Jarry’s Père Ubu. As if this wasn’t already more than enough, the deadpan footnotes that frame Novak’s memoir give the reader to understand that it is being received in instalments by the staff of Glass Eye Press, a Fitzrovian publisher of under-the-counter filth whose back catalogue would make Joe Orton blush.