Unpublished in his lifetime, this is a delightfully screwy subversion of the Bildungsroman, in which a couple of charming naïfs find themselves mixed up in a short-lived independent city-state governed “according to the laws of music” by an enigmatic and somewhat proto-fascist Garibaldi-type. Aickman is ickily obsessed with the particulars of the numerous different costumes his female characters put on, but at the same time they’re quite the pair of asskickers, navigating the surrealities (men called Brian, the “garment store”) and outright insanities (the house formerly occupied by a serial killer, decorated with eyes and teeth) of their situation with endless and very English practicality. Over the novel looms the horror of the First World War, in which our heroine’s adored older brother was killed. It’s a very funny book, much lighter than Aickman’s short fiction, but unsettling in a different way.