“We’re all in the gutter but some of us are ogling the sparkles”. Set in the fag end of the 1960s and framed as a novel within a novel published by a seedy London Purveyor of pulp fiction, Man-Eating Typewriter is a homage to the avant-garde counterculture of the 20^th century. Millward’s story of 1960s Soho, told in Polari slang, with elements of sailors’ Italian, Yiddish, Romany and Irish spread from travellers of fairgrounds and dockyard to become a coded dialect for gay men in the mid-20^th century Britain. Man-eating typewriter unspools in flavoursome Polari with intricate, hilarious and recounts a farcical and grotesque pursuit of freedom and ecstasy as the Swinging Sixties slide into a darker decade.

In Paris, May 1968, our anti-hero exults in the “knee-jerk up splurge” of art, sex and poetry. It’s late 1969, seedy Soho erotica publisher Glass Eye Press begins to receive chapters of purported memoir by “Raymond Marianne Novak”. Not satisfied with  writing a lurid chronicle in fruity Polari of his misadventures in the postwar East End, the Merchant Navy and the 1960s rag trade, Novak announces that in July 1970 he will commit a ”fantabulosa crime” in 276 days that will revolt the world. Novak invents a French mother (“Madame Ovary”) who consorts with surrealists and resisters in wartime Paris, a squalid childhood in bombed out Stephney, then a grim stretch as foster child, with cross dressing, omnisexual the “lone wolfy” Novak soon joins the Merchant Navy, where some same-sex affections and non-standard garment may find compatible.  A surrealistic odyssey that stretches from occupied Pris to the cruise-liner SS Unmentionable to lawless Tangier before settling in Swinging London, the book casts Novak as an agitator and freedom fighter, as his memoirs become more and more threatening, his publishers find themselves far more involved in his violent personality cult than they ever imagined.

Constructed like a hallucinogenic cocktail of A Clockwork Orange, Pale Fire and Jean Genet’s jailbird fantasies, Man-Eating Typewriter is an act of seductive sedition by a writer of unfathomable literary talent and boldness. Wild , transgressive, erotic and resolutely uncompromising, this marks the return of a writer who is out there on an island of his own making, a book that will be talked about and celebrated and puzzled over for decades.  The mystery writer tells  his tale as an Omni man of taste and bona grace who flourishes amid the Nova youthquake cult of trendy London.

Back in libertine Soho, he sets out to conquer a newly “gender skewed, class smashed” culture, recruiting drifters and sex workers into his cult commune and alternative fashion boutique. As confessions develops into megalomania, the Glass type crew takes this satanic screed like a hippie-era version of Billy Shaker’s villain, Dicky Trey” ( Richard III). Man-Eating Typewriter’s fantasy episodes of cartoon brutality and  obscenity, with exorbitance and marathon cabaret act, as the “Liberated Lavvy” bloats into hubris and abuse. We relish this on “ Sprawling cock and bull story” as an epic virtuoso turn.

Man Eating Typewriter by Richard Milward, Rabbit £25, 544 pages