Time is unravelling, and sleep can't knit it up again. The sublime and ridiculous Dr Hoffman has taken over reality in the city, and nothing will ever be the same again. Mirages and spectres intertwine themselves with daily life until the city's population is driven half-mad by dreams. Only the grey-suited Minister and his Determination Police have a chance of restoring normality.
This kind of thing would normally be placed in the box marked "Science Fiction", but Angela Carter is well-educated and female, so we'll call it magical realism instead. (Similar exemptions apply for Argentinian writers, of course.)
I wanted to like this so much. The premise is irresistible: the hero's battle against unreason is a succession of fairy-tale-like adventures, and his attempt to destroy the desire machines involves confronting a smörgåsbord of wildly conflicting, sometimes perverse desires. The book could be challenging and erotic and wildly exciting. Instead, it's a crashing letdown, combining tedious literary self-referentiality with still more tedious pseudo-scientific pseudo-explanations. Perhaps to show she's not asleep at the wheel, Carter also throws in a spot of paedophilia and a couple of rapes.
Carter's writing redeems the material to some extent. Even at her worst, she's still readable. But it's surprising that a writer like her, given so much scope, couldn't come up with something better. Perhaps that thought nagged at her too. As the hero asks us, "If you feel a certain sense of anti-climax, how do you think I felt?"