So they reopened the line to Trancentral, and the first arrival was 2023. A few people noted the apparent hot-take satire in pre-release excerpts, and I was concerned not least because Cauty's solo art has sometimes verged on the B*nksy, but don’t worry: there are layers. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d deliberately released sections which sound awful in isolation precisely to weed out the lightweights, just like the way Alan Moore’s novels always include one chapter that’s only just a

So they reopened the line to Trancentral, and the first arrival was 2023. A few people noted the apparent hot-take satire in pre-release excerpts, and I was concerned not least because Cauty's solo art has sometimes verged on the B*nksy, but don’t worry: there are layers. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d deliberately released sections which sound awful in isolation precisely to weed out the lightweights, just like the way Alan Moore’s novels always include one chapter that’s only just about readable. Alan Moore is here as a character, of course: he’s a member of massive but bankrupt has-been band Extreme Noise Terror, along with Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty. In the novel-within-the-novel, that is: the 'Publisher’s Preface’ explains that the Drummond and Cauty who found the book are undertakers. And while you could say that’s metaphorically true, said preface also claims that 2023 won’t be sold in the likes of Amazon or Waterstone's. I pre-ordered my copy from Waterstone's because that way you get a special stamp. Rule one: 2023 lies.



All fiction does, of course, though sometimes these days people seem to forget it, take the narrator or character’s views for the author’s. Needless to say, that’s one of the many ways you’ll come a cropper here. The most obvious model is wide-eyed sixties countercultural screed Illuminatus!, but what you might not know from that book’s reputation – I suspect because many more people started it than finished it – is that it ends up a lot less ‘Yeah! Rebellion! Screw the Man!’ than it started. So too here, except 2023 doesn’t even start out that rebellious. One of the things you don’t really get from that Guardian excerpt with its AppleTree and GoogleByte is that this future ruled by five megacorps? It’s a utopia. Not the sinister fake sort, but for real. Sure, it’s still unevenly distributed, some places are poorer than others – but AIDS and ebola are cured. War’s a thing of the past, ISIS are happier running YouTube channels than they were decapitating people, and Fairtrade had to rename because now all trade is fair. It is potentially significant here that the CEOs of the big companies are all gender-switched versions of their male equivalents in our world; right down to the author of the book-within-book being Roberta Antonia Wilson, this is a book fascinated by the idea that if millennia of male power made the mess, then women taking over is the solution. In part, it’s a rejoinder to the blokiness and male fantasy angle which mar Illuminatus! and its countercultural kin; less appealingly, it can lapse into essentialism, though again it would be a category error to take the more TERF-y views expressed in some places here for the authors’ own. Still, if you’ve been reading Drummond for a while, you should know that he can’t resist prodding at the profoundly problematic, and there’s definitely nothing here to rival the more appalling depths of his work with Zodiac Mindwarp.



So: 2023 in another timeline. Utopia, more or less. No death squads, no book-burning, but because people are people, some of them aren’t happy. Crucially, though, these unhappy people? They’re mostly fairly terrible. A pensioned-off Putin. A Dalston poser. A self-declared African monarch whose primitivist/futurist celebration of disorder rightly horrifies his family. These are agents of chaos in a borderline Warhammer sense of ‘chaos’, destruction for its own sake or for the sake of some vague sense that a more meaningful world might result. And the action of the novel largely revolves around one of them somehow contriving to throw a perfectly tailored golden apple into this Olympus and get everything kicking off. Drummond and Cauty aren’t just being harsh on themselves as Drummond and Cauty, ageing has-beens, but also on the whole category of artist-pranksters they’ve made their own. And versions of them refract through this under various fairground mirror aliases – they may be the American Medical Organisation, or two Ukrainian women with a submarine, or the Utah Saints, but however huge their hits, they never come off looking like terribly impressive figures. Around them move various familiar figures, distorted to greater or lesser extents. Even beyond the gender-swaps, some of the characters’ names have been changed – Gaga and Azaelia Banks have the faintest of aliases – but others haven’t. The titles of Harry Potter novels are changed, but not Harry’s, or Dudley’s. Everyone from Michelle Obama and Yoko Ono to Subcomandante Marcos and Drums of Death (aka Colin from Oban) turns up under their own name. The preface’s pseudo-publisher and their worries about legal issues? I worry too. If nobody sues over this, I’ll be amazed.



So is it any good? Well, considered as a conventional novel, it’s a bloody mess, even before an ending which is no less disappointing for admitting that endings tend to disappoint. But then, considered as a sailboat your bookshelves are a dead loss too; just because they're made with the same materials, doesn’t mean they’re trying to do the same thing. As an interrogation of Illuminatus!, another component of the KLF’s own wonky mythology, a part of their baffling ongoing Gesamtkunstwerk, it’s every bit as essential as the ice cream van, the bonfire, or the songs. Well, OK, maybe not the songs.