Fringe Dwellers

If religion is the opiate of the masses, then surely paranoia must be the treasure trove of the downtrodden, a way to discover in the coincidences of a mostly bleak life a golden map of connections where everything sparkles with meaning. Not that there aren’t enough opiates and amphetamines floating around Martin Millar’s “Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation” to keep the masses fairly happy, too.

First published in Britain in 1987, when Millar wasn’t yet 30, the book is finally appearing in its first American edition — a development not only welcome but ages overdue.

The sometime narrator, Alby Starvation, is a down-on-his-luck amphetamine runner whose main triumphs in life thus far have been to amass a large collection of comics and to cure himself of the ailments brought on by a serious milk allergy. As word of his cure spreads and others also quit drinking milk, it’s easy to see how the Milk Marketing Board would decide to send a Brazilian-­trained hit woman to kill him.

That’s just the main part. There are also dueling Chinese video gamers, a grocery manager trying to catch shoplifters so he can afford a pool a person can swim in without actually going anywhere, the lost crown of Ethelred the Unready, various doctors, a psychic nurse, murder victims, a hamster and more, all of whom fit in seamlessly.

Possibly more to the point regarding comics, Millar’s book comes about as close to a nongraphic graphic novel as anything I can imagine — a plus for a person like me who is not a particular fan of graphic novels. But Millar’s bite-size chapters and the mini-sections within them have much the same effect as the frames of a traditional comic. The form allows for incredible mobility and action; we have to jump with the narrative or we’ll fall out of it. The pleasure here, as in video games, is the rhythm and timing of those leaps. The downside of such a technique is, not surprisingly, that it’s tough to be deep and intro­spective when you’re so jittery. “Milk” is a giddy journey, an amusement park ride, an enchantment like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” but it’s not the kind of book that inspires brooding. I rather doubt Millar is big on brooding.

“Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation” falls almost exactly between a young adult novel in the vivid, visual quality of its sentences and a grown-up one in the desolation of its setting. While at least one person has compared it to the work of Irvine Welsh, Millar was there earlier, along with Flann O’Brien and William Burroughs.

What is the book really about? I find it hard to say outside of the experience of reading it. Its charm, in addition to the crisp prose (“Down in Brixton the youth are shambling through the streets wondering where their next drug is coming from”), is in the gradual transfer of information generated by the cat’s cradle of paranoia to the real world. Though no characters are saved or learn anything, in the end at least most of them are spared to live on in one fashion or another.

Millar has written seven novels since “Milk,” and his American publisher, Soft Skull, has issued or is issuing at least a few of them. In its own way, this one may be the best. It’s right on that edge between youth and wisdom, cute and serious, words and pictures. If you are the type of person who doesn’t like books that announce they’re weighty, then read this one; you’ll like it. If you read only serious and weighty books, give yourself a break and pick this up. It will remind you of your youth — or somebody’s.