20 reader reviews and Amazon’s own editorial review

“Finally, 155 pages into the thing I found the plot developed and the pages instantly became more turnable: a real story, at last. The same characters that had frustrated me in the first six chapters were fleshed out with real personalities and direction, and sub-plots I cared about appeared as if from nowhere. If Self set out to deliberately starve the reader in the first half of the story to force him to gorge himself on the second, then it worked on me. Granted, the final twist in the plot is rather kitsch and you can see it coming from a hundred paces, but by then I was entertained enough by the main characters’ destinies that I didn’t mind.” - Anthony Charlton

How The Dead Live, Reviews: How The Dead Live | No Comments »

Sam Leith, May 1997

“When Simon Dykes awakes one morning from uneasy dreams, he finds himself transformed in his bed into a giant ape. Worse, the young artist’s attractive and sexually voracious girlfriend, Sarah, is now a well-upholstered and no less sexually voracious chimpanzee. Simon goes, as Self would have it, ‘humanshit’. He spent the previous night swilling, snorting and pilling among a crowd of tatty media whores in a London clubland familiar from Self’s novella, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis. So Simon, not unreasonably, assumes that he is suffering a psychotic episode brought on by overdoing the ‘crap bar-room cocaine’. No such luck. He is carted off to secure accommodation, and a team of primate psychiatrists set about ‘curing’ him of the inexplicable delusion that he is human.”

Great Apes, Reviews: Great Apes | No Comments »

Jayne Margetts, 1997

“Great Apes is arguably a twist of genius, and there are passages that kindle the imagination. But sometimes Will Self has the habit of carrying himself too far out on a limb, snaking his way into over analysis and attention to detail. However, in the current climate of decadent London’s artistic excess he’s sure - like his fictional protagonist Simon Dykes - to be the toast of the town for a long time. ”

Read the full review

Great Apes, Reviews: Great Apes | No Comments »

Charles Wyrick, 1997

“Using Dykes as his Gulliver, Self takes a hilarious romp through modern society. In “Great Apes” the worlds of contemporary art, academics and psychiatry fall quickly as easy prey to Self’s mock sociology of chimpanzee culture. Just imagine a popular art opening crowded with chimpanzees dressed in chic chimp evening wear and you can get a peek at the novel’s vision. “Great Apes” is literature’s Planet of the Apes as author Self plays the role of a funhouse anthropologist, a voyeur into a world of his own warping. On waking to a world modified to satisfy chimpanzee issues, the protagonist Simon Dykes is hysterical. As readers we can only be amused. When Simon Dykes first screeches at the sight of his girlfriend’s hairy chest and arms, we know we are witnessing the birth of a strange world.”

Great Apes, Reviews: Great Apes | No Comments »

Gary Krist, September 1997

“Such, believe it or not, is the story line of ”Great Apes,” and if it doesn’t sound like your idea of literature, you’re probably not alone. In earlier books, like ”My Idea of Fun” and the story collection ”Grey Area” (in which both Zack Busner and Simon Dykes previously appeared, though in human form), Self made a name for himself as a defiant satirist with a peculiar mastery of the vocabulary of modern neurosis. Cultivating controversy in his life as well as in his work (during his stint as a reporter in the recent British election campaign, he was thrown off John Major’s plane, accused of shooting heroin in the bathroom), he has polarized the reading public both here and in England, earning the usual iconoclast’s reward of rabid denunciations and hyperbolic praise.”

Great Apes, Reviews: Great Apes | No Comments »

It’s a wild, Wilde world

Will Self knows something about repressed, homosexual, aristocratic drug addicts

In 1998 I was approached by Joan Bakewell and her then husband, Jack Emery, to consider doing a film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray . Some money came from Jack and more from Channel 4. Without this commission I don’t think that I would ever have considered adapting Wilde, let alone re-novelising him.

Dorian | No Comments »

Tom Shone, October 2000

“Will Self’s new novel consists of a monologue by a Jewish mother who goes by the name of Bloom. So naturally, the first thing you do upon picking up the book is flick to the final page to see what the last word is. And sure enough, instead of ”yes” — the word used by James Joyce to end ”Ulysses” — we find the contemporary negative ”Not,” as used by Mike Myers in his canonical postmodern masterpiece, ”Wayne’s World.” A serious literary allusion, or a snickering joke? A dialogue with a classic or mere punkish self-adornment — the literary equivalent of Johnny Rotten wearing a T-shirt of Queen Elizabeth? Practiced Self readers will know that the answer is all of the above, with a good helping of impudence thrown in for good measure.”

How The Dead Live, Reviews: How The Dead Live | No Comments »

Tom Templeton, January, 2004

“Back in the Eighties, I drew a cartoon strip in the New Statesman about a middle-class Andy Capp whose response to the recession was never to get out of bed. I’d always been a frustrated writer and the captions got longer and longer and the drawings more rudimentary until I dispensed with the drawings altogether.

Having children is the point at which you have to be who you are. Up until then you can assume another name, change your group of friends or move to another part of town, but once you have children you can’t unwish yourself because that’s to unwish them. ”

Interviews with Will | No Comments »

Alex Clark, January 2006

“In rather less sombre vein, Douglas Coupland’s jPod (Bloomsbury, June) is a typically satirical take on the new breed of supergeeks and, in itself, an update of the bestselling Microserfs. Meanwhile, Will Self’s new novel, The Book of Dave (Viking, March), takes us to a post-apocalyptic London in which a cabbie’s memoirs become the unexpected inspiration for a new religion. Look out also for new books from Helen Dunmore, Alan Warner, AM Homes, Jake Arnott and Clare Morrall, and a much-anticipated debut in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (Fourth Estate, May).”

Read the full article

The Book Of Dave | No Comments »

A lengthy and coherent analysis of Will Self’s work and its similarities with the writing of Georges Bataille by Brian Finney:

“Self sees himself paradoxically both as a moral satirist and as a social rebel who is more interested in shocking his middle-class readers than in reforming them. ‘What excites me,’ he has said, ‘is to disturb the reader’s fundamental assumptions. I want to make them feel that certain categories within which they are used to perceiving the world are unstable’ (Glover 15).

Essays about Will, Junk Mail | No Comments »