Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation is the flip side of the popular image of punk as a revitalizing movement for social change as we meet the ones who came for the party without the realization that it wasn't just about loud music, getting drunk, and doing speed so they could dance all night. Like the dregs of the hippies on heroin after the days of flower power and peace and love had passed, the characters of Alby and his friends are pathetic lost souls with no direction who wanted something for nothing and ended up going nowhere fast. Whiles there's a dark humour to Ably's neuroses, in the end it's just sort of sad and pathetic.
What saves the book from being ultimately depressing though is Millar's sense of the absurd, for the storyline itself is right out of Monty Python's school of taking an illogical situation to its most logical conclusion. That Alby is not crazy and the Milk Marketing Board has really hired an assassin to kill him because he has adversely affected milk sales across Britain, is merely the tip of the very peculiar iceberg contained within the pages of the book. While it might not be to everyone's cup of tea, if you're willing to put up with the slightly bitter taste and the twist and turns of the style, Milk, Sulphate, And Alby Starvation will never bore you and will continually surprise you, which on its own makes it worth reading.
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