GCSE 1 : 2 SELF (Will Self in general)

Member Name: scallmorpheedy

Product:	Will Self in general
Date:	08/01/02 (72 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Contemporary, maze, lots of words with z in

Disadvantages: Downers, Uppers, Whiteys

Before you plough into this opinion, I might as well tell you from the off that I like Will Self.

Not like that, you understand, I simply like the fella. He might look slightly menacing, he uses words of which I have no comprehension and I daresay he’d take pleasure in digging my face with a spade and yet he holds a special place in my heart. Whilst he may not know it he has done a lot for me over the years and for this I will always be grateful.

So what has he done? Well read on.

If the intention of my GCSE English Literature teacher was to put me off books for life then she almost succeeded. Due, solely, to her utterly dry and loveless approach to literary analysis, only one and a half books passed my eyes between the ages of the ages of sixteen and twenty-six. Sure there were text books and the like, but not one work of literature, not one iota of fiction save for the lovely Silas Marner by George Eliott and the un-finishable Middlemarch (both read after my finals to fill in the gaps between drinking sessions.)

This teacher, God rest her soul, had led me through four or so years of my education and by a war of tedious attrition she had taken all that was great in books and replaced them with “themes” and “contrasts” all of which were supported by those in the know and the literary glitterati. They were all of course bollocks. As a direct result I did science things. Oh dear.

So where does Will come into this? Well like a great Leviathan of literature he came along to strike a blow against stuffiness. He raised his right hand and in a pendulous thrust he brought this cluster of pentadactyly to bear on the hapless Mrs ________ sending her into a spiralling parabola that cast her and my dislike of books into an oblivion of continual analyses of Lady Macbeth’s hand washing. Hurrah.

I was in Newcastle airport, heading for Copenhagen and a conference that was billed as the most sp
ectacularly tedious ever. Standing in WH Smiths pondering the latest sub-porn gentlemen’s style magazines, I noticed a stout looking grey book with the queerest looking fellow on the cover. The bloke was dressed in grey and looked for all the world like an ape. The book turned out to be Great Apes by Mr Self. The synopsis suggested that it might be worth a look.

I won’t go into the book or indeed any of his books here because I want to talk more about his work as a whole and, if necessary, I can do each book later. Suffice is to say I liked it, in fact I liked it a lot, fair enough there are bits in it that aren’t great and bits that are overplayed but that to me makes it more enjoyable. I like it when books have bits in it that aren’t quite right, they make the writer more real, they make them seem less carried away with themselves. But that is by the by.

From this book I moved on to his other works. These can be divided into four types. His novels and novellas, his short story anthologies, his collections of writings, and the books I’ve never seen before. See below for details.

To divide them up however is meaningless because common threads run through them all and here I begin to cringe because I start to sound like my English teacher. The witch! Why didn’t Will hit her harder?

Firstly there is the obvious thread: drugs. But there are also the threads of psychiatry, sexual viscerality, disturbed reality, death, the awareness of his own threads and fantastically skilled writing.

But first how about drugs? It is no secret that Will Self has travelled on the mainline and been partial to tooting. Indeed he famously lost a journalist job for admitting to having something on board when travelling with John Major.

Drugs riddle his work; both illicit and otherwise. Indeed it might seem to many readers that the majority of his work is the direct result of capital H (and not him ou
t of steps.)

He plays drugs in many ways. His stories often concern drug dealers and the drug culture in general. Short stories in Tough Tough toys for Tough Tough Boys (TTTFTTB) and a large body of the work in Junk Mail centre on this culture. In TTTFTTB this is through fiction with drug dealer brothers discovering that the fabric of a building is simply buzztastic and is in fact crack cocaine. The story sees the impact this has on the brothers, one an addict and the other a “businessman.” In Junk Mail his work is more factually based with articles on crack sellers in this country and other related topics.

In these stories or works he has an almost impartial voice, which seems uncaring but is perhaps highly indicative of his own history. You sense relief that he is past his worst days but the nature of past dependencies is that they are never far away. It is evident that drugs are out there and in particular in Self's own set. In Great Apes and The Sweet Smell of Psychosis recreational popping and sniffing is rife and described without a pause for comment. Indeed in Great Apes it perhaps precipitates the main thrust of the novel and in both novels the drug taking is part of a London set that Self is presumably an element of.

A drugs link also infiltrates his take on psychiatry. He, presumably as a consequence of his past, has an interest in the actions of drugs and in particular those that affect the mind. He describes in detail the action of a group of anti depressants known as SSRI’s and in other areas he demonstrates a good knowledge of the action of brain chemicals and neurotransmitters.

These influences again litter his text. In Great Apes they form part of the main characters recovery. They also crop up, as you might expect, in The Quantity theory of Insanity and in Grey area and other stories. The common thread between all of these is the psychiatrist Dr Busner (be he ape or human.) We see the Dr c
onduct clinical trials with pharmaceutical agents that have perhaps not had the required Medicine Control Agency clearance. The three stories linked together have a brilliant sense of sequence. In one story we see these trials, in another we see the impact they may or may not have had and in another we see the ward in which they are used from the staff’s viewpoint. Individually the stories are good but when viewed as a whole they develop a fantastic texture.

The theme of psychiatry is also explored in terms of its general concept. By this I mean the popular and medical perception of what sanity or insanity actually entails. Of course the book that reflects this is The Quantity Theory of Insanity. In the story of the same title the central character is attempting to prove that there is a constant and limited amount of sanity in the population. If you have a few really insane individuals then the rest of the population is more likely to be sane. Conversely if there are no really insane individuals then the majority of the population is likely to have an inherent degree of insanity. It’s a great concept backed up with some vaguely impressive equations that are in fact meaningless. It’s a great story and everybody should read it or at least try to think about its implication in sanity and other areas of popular public perception.

So that’s the psychiatry side to his work, probably not very well covered but I could tell just by looking at you that you wanted to know more about the sexual viscerality thread. In particular what does it mean? Well basically it means that in all of his work the sexual act is seemingly stripped of love and often stripped of real desire and is described merely as the movement of flesh against mucous membrane.

This is perhaps most evident in the double novella Cock and Bull. In this a man grows a vagina and a woman grows a penis.

As they do.

The man is raped on the back of
his knee by his GP and the woman takes the afternoon tea phrase of “Ahhh Bugger him indoors" a touch too literally. In both scenes THE ACT is described in absolute biological terms. The same is true in The Quantity theory of Insanity in which a sex scene between the main character and a nurse is little more than a biologically accurate geography of the genitalia. It seems a shame that this is the case. I don’t want Will to be the new Mills and Boons but perhaps just once he should allow his characters to be taken to that place, you know where, “New Heights” I believe it is called.

Yet the point does work well in some cases, particularly in Great Apes when the ape that thinks he is human goes back to Dr Busner’s house just in time for the breakfast shagging session to which all family members are invited and welcome to attend more than once. It doesn’t sound very nice but in the context of the book it is a pivotal point.

So what was the third from last point? Slide the bar up and remind me would you. That’s right; Disturbed Reality. Well basically everything he does is about this, all of the above demonstrate this, that fine fragile line between what is real and unreal and how we tread that line with abandon. Disturbed reality is everywhere in Self's work. Be it his inability to cope with scale in Grey areas etc and his miniaturisation at his desk or My Idea of Fun and its almost inconceivably complex plot line.

Listen I’ll give you a tip. If you thought Fight Club was a bit hard to grasp then My Idea of Fun is even more s, it is nothing short of genius or it could be nonsense I’m not sure.

Other examples of this reality distortion are in TTTFTTB when a man becomes pals with a party of insects to a disturbing degree. Be it Grey areas’ Zeusian idea of six people controlling every aspect of London life. Perhaps you could add the story of a man framed for paedophili
a. They may not be nice stories but they do smack of something. They smack of a man prepared to consider all possibilities and a man not afraid to present them.

Next comes death or rather its absence. Will seems to have a preoccupation with death not being the end. This is most clearly evident in How the Dead Live. In this novel a woman dies of cancer and is helped into the next life by her helper. She moves into a flat on a road tucked just off the world of the living and begins her life after death. During this she is accompanied by her life burdens, these take the form of an unborn foetus with a proclivity for singing and presences that represent the fat she tried to shed during her life. This story is clearly a follow on from one of his earlier stories The North London Book Of The Dead from the Quantity Theory of Insanity. In this Self bumps into his mother in London. Since her death she has been living in a quiet suburb with the other dead, he has a chat about this that and nothing and then they part. Brilliant.

It is this kind of link between stories that explains the strange thread that I called the awareness of his own threads. By this I mean he obviously knows that he has created these links in his works. I say this because he even alludes to the technique in My Idea of Fun. The story is about a man called Ian, who has a strange relationship with a man called the fat controller. This man has strange powers that you will discover when you read it. As part of this he insinuates himself upon Ian by his appearance in popular literature. He appears in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Addict –clearly self referring- and other texts and ultimately Ian cannot evade him. You will have to read it to get the significance but it is a classic, if unintentional, example of a novelist’s work reflecting his or her own style.

Yet, then, just when you think you know someone, they bring out a book that changes all that.
I thought that Self was this brilliant, bleak, recovered drug addict with a warped but real view of the world. I believed he was aloof and different and then I read Feeding Frenzy, a collection of late-nineties reviews for the food section of his employee paper along with sundry writings. This collection dates from the time when Britpop was at the zenith of the blip it created in the world of musical influence and at a time when Jamie Oliver was watching Ainsley on Ready Steady Cook with his trousers around his ankles. They reveal a down to earth Self a man more chilled with life and fleetingly happy. I read them now and realise how his work has lightened over the years. He has perhaps left his past behind, past but not forgotten.

So this brings me full circle apart from the brilliant writing bit.

Simply this, he does.

The one tip I should give you is that you will need a dictionary. You will also notice a lot of words cropping up here and there one of them being __________ (insert your own.) I understand from a recent television performance that one of his favourite words is Truckle. I also believe that he doesn’t like cheese ball snacks because apparently “Like Proust’s madeleine they cause his past buffet parties to reel into view.”

Give him a crack, he may be unreadable but if you get the new penguin range they do look good on the shelf. Select from the following (as quoted on Waterstones web site):

Novels / Novellas:

Cock and Bull 1993 Penguin ISBN 0140173048 £6.99
My idea of Fun 1994 Penguin ISBN 0140234004 £6.99
The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis 1997 Bloomsbury ISBN 0747531544 £4.99
Great Apes 1998 Penguin ISBN 0140268006 £6.99
How The Dead Live 2001 Penguin ISBN 0140268650 £6.99

Short stories Anthologies

The Quantity Theory of Insanity 1994 Penguin ISBN 0140234012 £6.99
Grey Area and other stories. 1996 Penguin ISBN 0140247114 £6.99
TTTFTTB 19
99 Penguin 0140268642 £6.99

Collected Works

Junk Mail 1996 Penguin ISBN 0140257225 £8.99
Feeding Frenzy 2001 Viking ISBN 0670889954 £13.54 (hardback)

The Ones I’ve never seen

Perfidious man 2000 Viking ISBN 0670889814 £12.99 (text and photos)
Sore Sites 2000 Ellipsis ISBN 1141550310

Summary: