The astonishing success of the novel among Pelevin's largely youthful fan base shows how the author has succeeded in capturing a mood of apolitical resignation. But you don't actually try to put the fire out, he might have added. The novel's construction is complex. This is one of many deliberate anachronisms that shape a novel whose fixed point of reference is a contemporary psychiatric ward. For Voyd, that fantasy is his adventures with Chapayev, for another an interview with a sectarian Japanese businessman, for another a drug-influenced evening with a pair of criminals.
Dialogue forms the basis of the book and overshadows the torturous, circular construction.
Within the dialogues, Pelevin spins story on story, shifting between time and place, and tangling the multitudinous plotlines. But the lucidity of the prose and Pelevin's talent as a pure fabulist sets him closer to Borges's contemporary Italo Calvino. In his early work, Pelevin, like Calvino, is at his best in the simple world of one-dimensional but hugely sympathetic characters who are diametrically opposed to one another for dramatic and comic effect. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller , understood. The Clay Machine-Gun would work much better as a set of short stories.