Will Self: Fiction Top Five
In this top five, I explore the biting fictional works of writer Will Self.
Why Self?
Seeing that Will Self has a new book out, The Quantity Theory of Morality, and I, somehow, have read all his published novels and short story collections prior (including a fair shake of his non-fiction), a top five is certainly in order.
Why, I hear you ask? (Not you, of course, the you I’ve invented, who curiously knows all my sordid literary blindspots.) Why have you read Self’s by no means meagre output when many lionised authors and seminal works, like those of Henry James, Tolstoy, Morrison, Chekov, Ellison, Wolfe1, Fitzgerald, Austen and Borges have yet to have a look in?—Proust, ferchristsakes!
It’s complicated. Well, actually no, it’s not complicated, it’s kinda silly. Or not silly, it’s just . . . Never mind, I’ll explain later.
My first Top Five plumbed the work of J. G. Ballard, who was a hero to Self and would, in later life, become both friend and mentor2. But unlike Ballard, whose work carries such an unusual, detached perspective and seems forged from his childhood experiences and strange societal behaviours he would come to witness, more so than specific writers, Self’s is the inverse; his works—certainly the early books—are indebted to literature that came before.
Self Transformation
If a core theme could be pinpointed across Will Self’s fiction, it would be extreme change. Think Gregor Samsa, in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, who wakes one morning to find, without explanation, that he has been transformed into a giant insect. Now, pluck poor Gregor from his unspecified city and drop him into a yuppie Soho bar, put a wine glass in one of his eight hands, a cocaine straw in another, surround him with people as hideous as he, and you begin to get the picture.
In both The North London Book of the Dead, the story that opens Self’s debut collection, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), and How the Dead Live (2000), death is not an end to life; it’s merely a change of address. Cock and Bull (1992) comprises two novellas, led by a female and male protagonist respectively, and explores, in each, the sudden growth of the opposite gender’s reproductive organs on their bodies and the ensuing consequences. Ian Wharton, in My Idea of Fun (1993), has become a puppet to the violent ideations of the sinister Mr Broadhurst, surely an invention of his unravelling mind, but who Ian increasingly believes lives in the unborn child he and his wife are about to have. The Book of Dave (2006), one of Self’s better-known efforts, alternates between present-day cabbie Dave Rudman, who is writing a manic diatribe about his ex-wife for not letting him see his son, and the future people of 523 AD3, where those writings have been unearthed and form the basis of a new spiteful religion.
Self inspires a fair amount of animus4. Mired early on in drug controversy, many see him as this dreary figure, whose excessively polysyllabic speech renders him at best droll, at worst pompous and incomprehensible. I happen to like Self. (Well, I would have to, wouldn’t I?) Whether creating a bastardised English lexicon, à la Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, or reimagining Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in 80s London amid the AIDS epidemic, or turning towards Joyce for his modernist trilogy, alienating any reader who favours conventional novel structure, as a writer, he takes big swings, and even when he doesn’t completely hit the mark, the result is seldom boring.
Preamble out of the way, let’s move on to the list.
What Self (The list):
Great Apes
Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys
Liver
Umbrella
Elaine
Note:
As with my previous Top Five, I’ve arranged this list chronologically instead of ranking-order. If you are reading this as a newcomer to Self and were to press me for which book to pick up first, I’m inclined to recommend Liver.
Self Explanatory
1. Great Apes (1997)
After a debaucherous drug-and-alcohol-tinged night out, Simon Dykes, in Great Apes (1997), awakens to a world where chimpanzees are the dominant species. These apes believe that Simon’s fervent claims of being human are the symptom of some strange delusion—after all, humans are those maladroit creatures found in zoos.
In this hilarious inversion, which draws obvious comparisons to The Planet of the Apes and Kafka’s A Report to the Academy, Self’s civilised simians wear clothes, but are still ape-in-appearance and tree-swinging ability. They don’t speak, of course, but sign, amid the typical vocalisations of their species, “HoooGraa!”. With the aid of maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner, Simon must come to terms with his inner chimpunity, if he’s ever going to get along in life.
2. Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (1998)
Two brothers strike up a plan to make it rich when they discover a gigantic rock of crack behind their basement walls; a man, alone in his country home while his girlfriend is away, makes a bizarre pact with the insects moving in; Two-year old Humpy’s gibberish begins sounding decidedly Germanic after businessman Herr Doktor Martin Zweijärig suffers a stroke; and what is the meaning of identity in a world where everyone is called ‘Dave’?—are just a few scenarios in Self’s third collection.
Self doesn’t so much break new ground in this assortment as he hones to their sharpest the trademark weird and horrifying short stories for which he made his name.
3. Liver (2008)
The four stories in this collection focus on the Liver, our body’s largest gland, under various conditions of ill health.
Foie Human takes us through the exclusive doors of the Plantation Club, where its alco-enthusiast members, including owner Val Carmichael, continue to knock back copious spirits, despite growing signs of cirrhosis—but is it a wilful descent, or is someone among their party instigating their fate?
In Leberknödel, a woman diagnosed with terminal liver cancer wishes to avoid the indignities of a slow death by travelling to a clinic in Zurich to be euthanised.
Prometheus, a talented and successful exec in Titan, a renowned London advertising agency—in a riff on the Greek myth—presents his liver to an insatiable vulture three times daily.
Birdy Num Num, this collection’s final story, is told from the vantage point of the hepatitis virus, an unwelcome guest, unwittingly chaperoned to a drug dealer’s flat—but by whom?
4. Umbrella (2012)
In 1918, Audrey Death, a munitions worker during the First World War, is deposited at Friern Mental Hospital when she succumbs to an unknown illness. Encephalitis Lethargica, the terrifying malady at this book’s centre which turns the afflicted into living statues, prisoners in their own bodies, and the drug L-DOPA, which miraculously reanimates them after decades of dormancy, are very real and will be familiar to anyone who’s seen the film Awakenings, based on the book by Oliver Sachs. Dr Zack Busner—Self regular throughout these three novels and many others—turns up in 1971 to administer this miracle drug. His patients spring back to life after nearly fifty years in this torpid state. But Busner finds, much like pulling the cord on a toy, the effects are sadly short-lived.
Umbrella, to date Self’s lone Booker-shortlisted work, is the first in a trilogy of modernist novels. Followed by Shark (2014) and Phone (2017), each book melds themes of war, technological invention and psychopathology.
The literary style, along with its title, is lifted from Ulysses. Written in the ‘continuous present’, the book eschews such niceties as chapters, paragraphs and common dialogue markers. The narrative often jumps decades mid-sentence, weaving time into its prose like threads of cotton.
Scanning the pages in a bookstore, you may be daunted by the unbroken walls of text and wonder if it’s not the work of an author wanting to be read so much as the rambling manifesto of a once-brilliant lunatic5. For this reason, Umbrella marked a significant change in Self’s writing, which continued on through the rest of the trilogy and beyond.
5. Elaine (2024)
Will (2019) marked another new turn, this time inwards. While many of Self’s previous works contained distorted visions from his past, whether it be a setting or former interactions with psychoanalysts, this was his most staunchly autobiographical. A memoir of sorts about his early life and narcotic misadventures, Will continues the stylistic tradition of his previous three novels, albeit reintroducing regular paragraphs, spacing between scenes and even—if you can believe it?—chapters.
His next book, Elaine (2024), goes even further back, to before he was born, to the woman who would become his mother. Partly based on diaries that Self’s mother kept for forty years, Elaine, whose own writing aspirations are constantly upended by housewifery duties and other such migraine-inducing banalities in her disastrous marriage, is left thinking, is this . . . it?
Featuring brief walk-ins from Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow, Elaine is a remarkable feat of autofiction in which Self, briefly, much like Dr Zack Busner in Umbrella, conjures his mother back to life, and perhaps like the maverick doctor of his earlier novel, would have had to reckon with the moral implications in doing so.
And that concludes my list. Have you read any of Self’s fiction? If so, what would make your top five? If not, are you now tempted?
My Self
Daft this may sound but in my early years Will Self was the first writer I became conscious of, whose face I could put to a name. I would’ve had a couple of shelf-fulls of Enid Blyton, certainly some Roald Dahl, some Goosebumps (and I distinctly recall a set of shiny-foiled Bonechillers books, including Teacher Creature, Frankenturkey, Welcome to Alien Inn), and some of it I may have attempted to read. There were other books in our house too, my mother’s: Danielle Steel, Thomas Harris, Frank McCourt, Dave Pelzer, among others, and of my father’s: several large Haynes maintenance guides for cars and motorbikes, but none of these had author photos that I can recall. Those authors existed only as names printed across a spine.
Books at this point in my life were these handsome things I’d flick through for a few seconds, before getting distracted by another, more boisterous way to pass the time. I liked the idea of reading, the thought of being a reader (an aesthete of sorts), but, in practice, it was an insurmountable chore. My hyperactive mind simply wouldn’t allow it. A few words in, a page at most, and I’d be struck suddenly by the impulse to climb up or jump off or slide down something I shouldn’t. Television however was the opposite. TV was sublime; TV was everything. And, vitally, television didn’t require me to sit still to enjoy it. Be-doobie-deebie-deebie-deebo, the theme song to Hey Arnold! playing, I could dance about the room, practice head and hand stands, see how many times I could spin around on one foot; I could punch a cushion’s guts out or try that thing where you lie on your back and then kick out and land (hopefully) up on your feet.
Beginning to move away—but not entirely—from cartoons to live action programming in my early teens, the easiest path was through over-the-top comedy shows. I had an especial taste for the slapstick and surreal, and there was, to me, none better than a certain Vic and Bob fronted panel show.
Shooting Stars became compulsory viewing. While references in many jokes would soar way over my head—True or False: Jeremy Irons?—they were always plenty bolstered by immature behaviour, unintelligible singing, and enough visual gags to keep me, perhaps for the first time, pinned to my seat. It’s through this show that I first encountered Will Self, who took over ‘Team Captain’ duties from Mark Lamarr in season four. Notably more serious than everyone else on the show (not least man-baby George Dawes, played by Matt Lucas), he was announced to the audience as ‘Writer, Will Self’, before engaging in a bit of banter with the show’s loony hosts. There, Vic and Bob would remark, ‘Ooh, isn’t he wordy?’, asking him to demonstrate his sesquipedalian bank of words or perhaps cheekily accuse him of copying from Martin Amis’s books, but the stone-faced Self would never rise to their playground goadings. He was, in a sense, the adult among oversized children. And, somehow, Self’s incongruity with Vic and Bob’s juvenile antics made them all the funnier.
It’s now many years since the show first aired. Watching it back—not for the purposes of this writing but, rather, because I never outgrew my weakness for Vic and Bob’s brand of silly humour—the references and bawdier jokes land with me at last, while the physical gags, such as attaching eight sucking vacuums to Johnny Vegas’s face, burying racecar driver Damon Hill in a perspex box filled with mushrooms, strapping a tube to Michael Winner’s nose and asking him to sniff out the dirty boy hidden within one of five plyboard boxes or jettisoning increasingly larger fruit at a contestant never stopped being funny.
Self’s incongruity on the show, I would also come to realise, was not some happy accident but intentional. (Obviously!) He was the appointed straight man, just as Mark Lamarr before him, and Jack Dee years later. But all the same, caricature or not, Self had made an impression on young me. He represented the entire bastion of literature for a time—a club I wanted in but could never be permitted. As a child, I would ponder the cosy notion of one day being a reader in the same way I’d imagine a career as a secret agent after watching James Bond, or foresee rock stardom ahead after becoming enamoured with a particular band. And similar to how my love for Vic and Bob’s wonderful buffoonery never dimmed, neither did those readerly aspirations. When I eventually summoned the concentration to make it to the end of a book6, it wasn’t long before I was exploring Will Self’s back-catalogue and found, to my delight, a lot to like.
Thomas, not Tom
This I feel is worth noting for those not overly familiar with Self’s work—the non Self-Absorbed, if you will—as an indicator of one of his many influences but also to counterpoint their differences.
“After Dave”
The top response to a Reddit post enquiring ‘Where to start with Will Self?’ is ‘Don’t’. Another, which posits the question ‘What happened to Will Self?’, speaking of his post-covid abscondment from TV commentary, was given the answer: ‘Vanished up his own arse.’
I found my copy on the shelves of a secondhand bookstore in town (sadly no longer in business), along with Dispatches, Michael Herr, The Plague, Albert Camus and, fittingly, Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Franz Kafka. It wasn’t until I returned home that I flicked through its densely inked pages—by then it was too late to be put off.
I’m not sure I ever learned how to sit still, though. My legs invariably start moving all on their own, to the annoyance of those on the couch next to me. I suppose I’m not all that different to my younger self—a little less destructive, perhaps.
I like Will Self a lot. But I haven’t read a lot. I have read Umbrella, Shark, Phone. Or listened to them on audiobook. Umbrella is a masterpiece I think.