Few writers, though, fail to have recourse to this ruse of packing in disparate material somewhere in the wilderness that often constitutes the middle of a book. Nothing is worse than writing something and then not seeing your labor put to profitable use.
The author also sees fit to include a summary of a lecture he apparently gave at McGill, arguing that 20th century literature was sick and its perpetrators should be exiled from civilized society, for which, he says, he was shortly afterwards "savaged by the administration" and fled to Taiwan.
Of course it's possible to take a very different view of this whole wild fantasy, to argue that intellectuality and pornography are two sides of the same worthless coin, and that this production partakes of both. It's true the book resorts to increasingly desperate measures as it progresses, and that the first half is much better than the second. But the heart of the matter is that this is a work of anarchic imagination, as were the very similar creations of Rabelais, and the author's courage in publishing it at all is an essential ingredient in any final judgment.
This book, then, is a wild, deliberately foul-mouthed assault on almost everything, including the author himself - "an uncontrollable laughable risk-taker riding to certain destruction" - and not least, both in its expressed opinions and in Barton's own outlandish practice, a peon of hatred aimed at "the baleful influence of the TOEFL corporation."
But it's also a brave book, hell-bent on destroying its own chances of finding a conventional publisher. It's best seen as a tribute to an historical phenomenon, the arrival here of large numbers of "addicts, drunks, mind-numbed e-ravers ... the Inghelish teachers of Taiwan," and an example of a writer seeking out his adopted home's "dark worlds of confusion." It's more than that, though, and the very fact that it's set in Taiwan at all is enough to excuse many, and perhaps all, of its shortcomings.
The book is available at Bookman Books, 2F, 88, Xinsheng S Rd Sec 3, Taipei (台北市新生南路三段88號2樓) and at the River Restaurant Art Gallery and Event, 18 Datong Rd, Chungli, Taoyuan County (桃園縣中壢市大同路18號).
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