My Idea of FunWill Self
Penguin, paperback, 309 pages
Grey Area
Will Self
Bloomsbury, hardback, 287 pages
Review by Gerald Houghton (1994)
Ian Wharton’s idea of fun is to behead a tramp on the Tube and fuck the empty neck-stump. For narrator, author and reader alike, it’s worth getting over it from the start. A headless tramp is a consequence, not a raison d’etre.
Will Self has a reputation that precedes him. Excessively tall, possessed of the most serious sideburns in English literature, and an Oxbridge-education. A recovering smack addict. It’s easy to lose sight of the man behind the intellectual fashion spread. Here are his debut novel and a new collection of short stories, evidence if ever it were needed of one of the country's most exciting contemporary talents.
A photographic memory is the bane of thirtysomething marketing consultant Ian Wharton, a party trick corrupted by the malign influence of The Fat Controller – the obese Mr Broadhurst – a visitor to his mother’s caravan park. Broadhurst is an international financier, a man possessed of the most flamboyant language, and blessed with a predilection for killing people. Can the heavily bearded Dr Gyggle’s deep sleep experiments improve Ian’s confused mental state? And will his penis really snap off if he penetrates a woman?
Self’s vocabulary is exceptional and matched only by his grasp of narrative; it’s a tightrope act to keep the reader engaged whilst simultaneously haranguing them with a rag bag of the grandiose and the grotesque. My Idea Of Fun successfully accommodates the intellectual and the offensive, daring to ask, ‛What’s red and sits in the corner?’, then answer it with lurid, Technicolor brushstrokes. The literary nasty is a precarious performance indeed.
The appreciation of fantasy and reality is deft, the command of the moral grey ground of genuine good and evil assured. The leap from first person to third is seamless, and it’s funny – the ‛vacuum cleaners’ used for abortions are ‛eternity’s housework’; living in Sussex, Ian ‛knew about old people the way a boy who lives next to an airport knows about planes.’ Skits (the snake and Mars Bar spring to mind) read like Identikit Burroughs. The sharply imagined Land of Children’s Jokes is something Jonathan Carroll would recognise. The whole, teetering on the edge of insanity and surrealism, seems to derive from a neighbouring postal district of the national psyche to the equally touched universe of Patrick McGrath. (How Self manages to wring the occasional note of crushing melancholy from such absurd material has to be seen to be believed.)
At least
My Idea of Fun is a real paperback – Grey Area is publishing’s first Filofax friendly book. Like some leftover designer 80s stationary or, to judge a book by its cover, an office manual, Self's short stories arrive loose leaf, clamped in black spiral jaws. It fails to resemble anything else on the shelf.Self admires the man he calls ‛the great Ballard’. From the novel: ‛You see I find this image . . . to be almost integral to any understanding of the modern world. Metal into flesh – the impact of metal on flesh’. There is more than a touch of the Ballards about much of this collection, albeit a Ballard with long words and bad jokes. And like him, Self is often to be found not so much writing narratives about people as reports about things about people. (The stuff other authors consign to brackets).
In the title piece a woman goes methodically mad in a corporate environment and asks, just how small is an event before it becomes a non-event? Self likes big ideas. Even big ideas about small things. Like those in his debut, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, the stories in Grey Area are about ideas. ‛Inclusion’ is the next stage for the Prozac generation: we’ve learned how to be happy, so here’s a drug to make us interested. Hence the artist swept up in a tidal wave of fascination, ‛a surge of motiveless and directionless interest in everything.’ (Shades of his excellent novel My Idea Of Fun). And the story is written in the form of a report. Elsewhere a man becomes really quite unduly gripped by the M40, reads science and art into road signs and dreams of becoming the smallest thing in the world (‛Motorway Verse’).
Even when Self is not dealing in the surreal the ideas keep coming: for every waiter in Los Angeles being an actor resting, their London equal is hard at work on The Great English Novel; that a young woman is a ‛fucking emotional Typhoid Mary’, spreading broken relationships like contagious disease.
It’s odd, then, that Grey Area begins with two stories that have nothing to say. ‛Between the Conceits’ tells us that everyone in London is controlled by just eight people. It’s an opening sentence. ‛The Indian Mutiny’ confesses a murder, but it’s a murder of such inconsequence that it’s hard to see why it was included. But the rest of the collection is so good, we can forgive these.
That Self's writing – as erudite, pedantic and self-important as it is – is worth the effort at all is surely his greatest idea. Articulacy so far up its own arse – ‛the synaptic gimbals had been unslung’ – that it emerges on the other side in great lucid, glistening globules that are as readable as they are impenetrable. It’s a rare art. My Idea of Fun is part allegory, part video nasty, part black comedy; Grey Area is clever, calculated, arrogant.
Self’s world is never tricksy or vulgar, no matter how blessed with knowing, ornate language. Indeed, for those with strong stomachs and a dictionary, it’s as infectious as the common cold.