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Will SelfWill Self
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Prizes and awards |
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BiographyWill Self was born in London in 1961. He graduated from Oxford University and began writing fiction, working as a cartoonist for the New Statesman and City Limits, a London listings magazine.
Genres (in alphabetical order)Fiction, Literary journalism, Non-fiction, Short stories
BibliographyThe Quantity Theory of Insanity Bloomsbury, 1991 Cock and Bull Bloomsbury, 1992 My Idea of Fun Bloomsbury, 1993 Grey Area Bloomsbury, 1994 Junk Mail Bloomsbury, 1995 The Sweet Smell of Psychosis (illustrated by Martin Rowson) Bloomsbury, 1996 Great Apes Bloomsbury, 1997 Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys Bloomsbury, 1998 How the Dead Live Bloomsbury, 2000 Perfidious Man (with photographs by David Gamble) Viking, 2000 Sore Sites Ellipsis, 2000 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (introduction) Bloomsbury, 2001 Feeding Frenzy Viking, 2001 Dorian Viking, 2002 Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe Bloomsbury, 2004 The Book of Dave Viking, 2006 Psychogeography Bloomsbury, 2007 Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes Bloomsbury, 2008 The Butt Bloomsbury, 2008 The Undivided Self: selected short stories Bloomsbury, 2008
Prizes and awards1991 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize The Quantity Theory of Insanity 2008 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize The Butt
Critical PerspectiveThe eponymous hero of Will Self’s novel, The Book of Dave (2006), is a London cabby. His angry, at times obscene reactions to the stresses of contemporary life, and the city he is driving around in, forms a holy book worshipped by people occupying the same territory in the distant future, when sea levels have risen drastically. This grand satirical conception comes complete with maps of the Island of Ham and the Ing Archipelago in the Year of Our Dave 523, and a glossary of their language: ‘Arpee English with Some Alternative Mokni Orthographies’ such as ‘dryva’ [priest] and ‘braykup’ [time in distant past, separation of the sexes]. The novel alternates between the two time zones and respective languages, as Dave’s story of marital break-up and separation from his son unfolds besides the story of a journey to the Forbidden Zone in search of the truth behind the holy book. Such a summary fails to do justice to the sheer satiric bile energizing the action, its linguistic ingenuity, and Dave’s painfully funny episodes of rage against the forces of bureaucracy and the legal system. Abandoning his cab, Dave starts walking across London and writing to his son. As this ‘revelation of the recent past and the distant future’ concludes, his cab is re-discovered in the year 523 and ‘the crackling, unearthly voice of Dave’ is heard over its intercom.
Will Self is certainly Britain’s leading satirical writer, and something of a public figure in combining his roles as a journalist/novelist with forcefully-expressed opinions on current political and social matters. In this, his is the manner of an American writer such as Norman Mailer, or – more precisely when his subject is drugs, gun crime or societal breakdown – Hunter S. Thompson. Self’s self-declared predecessors in the satire genre include Swift and Kafka, but we can also identify J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, and perhaps even Roald Dahl, as being important to him. The Book of Dave is a typical Will Self production, both in its London location and vehement narrative voice. In true satiric vein it holds up a distorting mirror to our society. As Doris Lessing observed, reviewing Self’s first collection of stories, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), ‘absurdity unfurls logically from absurdity, but always as a mirror of what we are living in – and wish we didn’t’. This collection actually contains the seeds of much of Self’s subsequent works, preoccupied as they often are with the effects of drugs, sex, politics, experimental psychology, even advances in neuroscience.
His peculiar angle on his native city is apparent in a story called ‘The North Book of the Dead’, with its intriguingly odd idea that, when you die, you simply move to another, even drearier part of London. It foreshadows what is perhaps his most acclaimed novel, How the Dead Live (2000). This is another scurrilously funny rant of a book, full of profanities, puns and running jokes whose mouthpiece is Lily Bloom, a 65-year-old Jewish-American for whom death is simply another inconvenience. She reviews her past, and her strange new life among the dead of ‘Dulston’, whilst able to keep an eye on the contrasting fortunes of her two daughters amid the Thatcherite economic boom. Meanwhile, Celebrity Culture is parodied by ‘Lithy’, a pop-singing calcified foetus.
As the latter detail indicates, a Self story or novel can often contain thoroughly nasty material, and give us characters in extreme states of mind; affected by drugs, neurosis, sexual oddities – or any anarchic combination of these. One thinks particularly of his early twinned novellas Cock and Bull (1992); in the first of which a submissive wife grows a penis and violates her husband, while in the second a macho man grows a vagina and finds himself becoming pregnant and emotional during a rugby tour. The narrator of My Idea of Fun (1993) – a perverse mixture of victim and gloating devil’s disciple - tells us at length how he came to be in a position where he has to decide whether he should go upstairs, kill his sleeping wife and deliver the child she is carrying. This book is one of his most inventive but also most disturbing, especially the narrator’s interaction with Dr Gyggle, a hospital psychiatrist using experimental drugs on addicts. Put into Deep Sleep by him, the narrator enters ‘The Land of Children’s Jokes’, a terrifying alternative realm where horrors start crossing over from dreams into reality.
Self has been prolific in recent years, producing several large books as well as newspaper and magazine columns, broadcasting on television and radio, in addition to public appearances. One of the issues he has taken up from his journalism into his fiction is the recent ban on smoking in public places in Britain. This surely informs his recent novel The Butt (2008), though, as always, this basic premise is enlarged out of all proportion into an absurd comedy of man against bureaucracy (and man against woman). The unnamed country is part-Australia, Africa and Iraq – in which father and husband Tom Brodzinski flicks the butt of his final cigarette over a hotel balcony and hits an elderly man on the head. This minor act of thoughtlessness impels Brodzinski into a full-scale collision with the legal system, and with his own ‘flabby liberal conscience’. The ensuing struggle to make amends involves taking supplies through tribal lands exploited by mining companies – in the forced company of another felon, a convicted child abuser. Again, a plot summary cannot convey the sheer vivacity of Self’s language, as it renders appalling conceptions and paranoia (‘nicotine withdrawal experienced as a full-blown mental illness’) with relentless plausibility. Financially exploited and betrayed by all around him, the hapless Brodzinski comes to realize ‘I’m … The butt of this situation’.
Self has most recently published Liver: A Fictional Organ With a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes (2008). As its title suggests, this is a collection of four stories themed around the liver. Three of them are set in London, notably a fascinatingly autobiographical one set in ‘The Plantation Club’ – fictive stand-in for The Colony Club in Soho. This was the haunt of alcoholic painters such as Francis Bacon; his character Trouget paints heads as if they are ‘part skull, part the melted plastic of dolls’. In ‘Prometheus’, the success of an advertising executive depends on the visits of a mysterious vulture, who feeds on his liver. ‘Birdy Num Num’ gives us the viewpoint of Hepatitis C on its junkie human hosts. And in ‘Leberknodel’ [Liver Dumplings], Self dramatizes the debate on assisted suicide with its story of a woman with terminal liver cancer. Will Self, being the kind of acerbic satirical writer he is, ensures that there are strange reversals of fortune along the way in these stories – as is always the case in his brilliant and disconcerting conceptions.
Dr Jules Smith, 2008
Author statement'I am fascinated by masculinity and gender. I have a very ambiguous sexual personal life, that's why I am so interested in it. I am a very girly person trapped inside a large, threatening male body. The fast cars and loud music and hard drinking in 'Tough, Tough Toys' are like a suit. I'm trying to deconstruct that image of men.' (Will Self quoted in interview with The Big Issue magazine, 20 April 1998)
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