Will Self

Reviews of Phone

The FT said Phone is “A novel of grand ideas, powered by a ravenous curiosity about the role of the technological revolution in our private and public woes, Phone nonetheless bristles with anxiety about the abuse of ‘intelligence’ — in medicine, in warfare, in software, in love … [Self’s] hurricane of eloquence blows in terrific passages of satire, comedy, even suspense — not to mention his pitch-perfect ear for the jargons and lingoes of modernity.”

The Mail on Sunday: “Zack is back. Will Self concludes his wordsplurging trilogy (Umbrella, 2012 Shark, 2014) with another unbroken block of modernist text featuring psychiatrist Zack Busner, now 78 and slipping mentally. Zack sections alternate with those in which Jonathan ‘the Butcher’ De’Ath of MI6, the great-nephew of an early patient (in Umbrella), has an affair with a British tank commander deployed to Iraq and caught up in prisoner abuse. Zack’s autistic grandson will connect it all through a smartphone he gives Gramps. Self’s preternatural gifts for invention weave human suffering and caring with psychiatry, war and technology. Difficult but a stunner.”

The Daily Telegraph: “Will Self’s new novel, Phone, is a kind of epic anti-tweet. It unspools over 600 pages without a single paragraph break, remorseless in its commitment to its own difficulty. It is a confrontational novel, making no concession to the abbreviated attention span of those who spend their millennial lives glued to the titular device. What better riposte to a culture that thinks in fewer than 140 characters?”

The Guardian: “This modernist narrative is best approached with a commitment to playfulness rather than a determination to hold all its strands close, and Self’s achievement is to make it intensely funny and humane. The book’s cerebral qualities are buttressed by his great skills as an observer and flaneur … Here, too, alongside the dead ends, the provisional tales and the fallen away characters, are some of the great stories: of damage handed on, generation to generation; of fading parents and vengeful children; of subterfuge and deception as necessary conditions of desire. And, of course, of death, which makes its most straightforward appearance in Phone’s closing lines, though it has been there all along.”

More reviews of Shark pt II

The Financial Times: “… an intoxicating experience. Self’s powerful command of language animates the intense prose while his dry wit is given a freer rein than in Umbrella. Shark drives remorselessly on; it takes us with it.”

The Mail on Sunday: “Self is on a mission to revive modernist fiction and newcomers will find the text, excised of paragraphs and most punctuation, tough at first. But it is unmatched for vibrancy and sensation, and befits the novel’s raw, disturbing subjects – the traumatised lives that orbit Dr Busner’s therapeutic community.”

Esquire: “… a dazzling feat: one in which metaphors morph into memories and sentences are swilled around and intermingled like fish guts in a chum bucket.”

The Independent: “Shark will challenge and disturb, exasperate and entertain. Self’s prose demands real attention, but is never less than sharp, biting and incisive. Prepare to be eaten whole.”

The Sunday Times: “Self’s ugly, sinuous and ceaselessly inventive prose does an exceptional job of evoking consciousness, the mind’s ‘wriggling little thoughtfish’. Formally, he achieves a masterly balance of surface chaos and underlying design, creating an intricate tattoo of linked shark and nuclear imagery, just as his phrases echo and rhyme and connect. Overall, Shark generates a dream-like synthesis of rational and irrational, familiar and strange.”

More reviews of Shark

Mark Lawson in the News Statesman: “In an era when publishers and reading groups exert so much pressure towards the soft read, Self … is saving the life of the hard read that rewards the attention demanded.” Review here.

Sam Leith in the Observer: “Self shares JG Ballard’s interest in the psychopathology of everyday life, and in the insistent strange juxtapositions between apparently discrete things. But where Ballard most often works at the level of symbol and image, and is almost militantly uninterested in the inner lives of his characters, Self’s rhymes and correlations bubble in the language itself, and his whole method is concerned with inwardness.” Review here.

Shark uncaged

Will Self’s new novel, Shark, is published in the UK today by Penguin. The Daily Telegraph‘s five-star review hails it as “a truly wonderful novel … an exciting, mesmerising, wonderfully disturbing book. Go with it and it’ll suck you under”. The Guardian‘s review says that “Umbrella was about how humanity brilliantly innovates; Shark is about how it constantly devastates … I have every expectation that when this trilogy does conclude, it will be recognised as the most remorseless vivisection and plangent evocation of our sad, silly, solemn and strange last century.”

To read a short extract from Shark, visit the Guardian website here.

Umbrella US reviews

Grove has just published Umbrella in the States, and early reviews have been as effusive as they were in the UK last year.

The Boston Globe: “The result is page after page of gorgeously musical prose. Self’s sentences bounce and weave, and like poetry, they refract. The result is mesmerizing.”

For the full review, go here.

The Economist: “An entertaining and enthralling book … [Self] has managed to write an experimental novel that is also a compassionate and thrilling book—and one that, despite its difficulty, deserves to be read.”

For the full review, go here.

The Washington Post: “Self’s wildly nonlinear narrative offers other delights: richly detailed settings that bring the Edwardian era and mental hospitals sensuously alive, kaleidoscopic patterns of symbolism (umbrellas assume all sorts of forms and functions), and loads of mordant satire. Yes, Umbrella is a ‘difficult’ novel, but it amply rewards the effort.”

To buy a copy of Umbrella for $16.24, go to Amazon here.

More Umbrella reviews

The Spectator: “Umbrella is a magnificent celebration of modernist prose, an epic account of the first world war, a frightening investigation into the pathology of mental illness, and the first true occasion when Self’s ambition and talent have produced something of real cultural significance.”

New Statesman: “Umbrella is as much a novel about the historical slump of modernist fiction – and its potential reanimation – as it is about the fates of encephalics … Self has knowing fun with timing his historical shifts to the rhythms of technology; a shop window in 1918 becomes a 1970s television spewing game-show prizes …  a complexly textured, conceptually forbidding thesis about the modern, its art and their discontents. This being Self, though, there is also a great deal of humour, much of it to do with the dismal, drugged, inhuman pass to which Busner’s patients have come after decades in their psychiatric ‘jail within a jail’.”

The Independent on Sunday: “Self’s stream-of-consciousness style allows him delicately to trace connections between war, technology and the mind … He renders the texture of Audrey’s London, its odours and colloquialisms, in vivid detail.

“Perhaps in the story of Sacks’ roused patients, Self saw a metaphor for his own attempts to resurrect the past, to give history a distinctive, earthy voice. In this he succeeds beautifully, writing with a new sophistication. The result is a stunning novel, and a compelling Self-reinvention.”

The Daily Telegraph: “‘The purpose of poetry,’ Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz once wrote, ‘is to remind us/How difficult it is to remain just one person’. Will Self’s new novel has at its heart the same purpose, in prose. Much of the book’s 90-year span is spent in a psychiatric hospital, where ‘personality’ unravels, and at the Western Front of the Great War, where reality is utterly fractured … Every experience is filtered through another, or infiltrated by it. At times, this Self-imposed exile from any “fixed regard”, threatens the narrative’s sanity, and its readability, but that is the point. Whether Umbrella takes experimental fiction beyond the magnificent cul-de-sac into which Joyce steered it is doubtful. But this fresh reminder of the potential of finding new selves – to be and to write with – is extraordinary.”

The Sunday Times: “If the realist novel welcomes you in, takes your coat, hat (and umbrella), shows you to a comfortable seat and gets you a gin and tonic, this book leaves you to let yourself in, sit yourself down (if you can find room) and get your own bloody drink if you insist on having one.”


Umbrella reviews

Financial Times:
‘An ambitiously conceived and brilliantly executed novel in the high modernist tradition of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf … Its scope is dazzling … The switches between perspective and chronology are demanding (there are no chapters), but Self handles them with bravura skill, setting up imagery and phrases that echo suggestively between different episodes … Umbrella is an immense achievement.’ (Full review here.)

The Guardian:
‘Though hard work is certainly demanded from the reader, it is always rewarded. Through the polyphonic, epoch-hopping torrent, we gradually construct a coherent and beguiling narrative. As the title-defining epigraph from Joyce alerts us – “A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella” – fraternity is an urgent concern.’ (Full review here.)

The Observer:
‘Umbrella is old-school modernism. It isn’t supposed to be a breeze. But it is, to use the literary critical term of art, kind of amazing … It may not be his easiest, but I think this may be Will Self’s best book.’ (Full review here.)

The Independent:
‘There is a contemplative quality to the prose that feels new … but the content remains familiar: a Swiftian disgust with the body; a fastidious querulousness about human sexuality; a forcing of attention on human frailty … Undoubtedly Self’s most considered novel, as much a new beginning as a consolidation of everything he has written to date.’ (Full review here.)

Daily Telegraph:
‘The Edwardian sections are the most lavishly engaging, with Self doing different voices like a schizophrenic music hall act. One of the most striking scenes is a journey taken by Audrey and her father through the thronging streets of “Lunnun town”, the father’s umbrella poking its way through all early 20th-century mod cons: motor vehicles, moving images, advertising, air travel, electric light, department stores, new professions. Audrey has a turn, the first sign of her brain fever, her hands beginning to shake with the impact of modernity. Self, the renowned flâneur, brilliantly paints the anxieties of the time in “this tour of the city about to be swept away” to make way for “the city of the future”, the patination of umbrellas covering a street soused in drizzle.’

‘In the course of the book the umbrella becomes a syringe, a penis, a fetish of the bourgeoisie, as one Edwardian socialist pompously declares it, and the novel itself an umbrella beneath whose canopy all manner of anxieties about technology and the body cram together.’ (Full review here.)

Scotland on Sunday:
‘Umbrella is an astonishing achievement, a novel of exhilarating linguistic invention and high moral seriousness.’ (Full review here.)

Daily Mail:
‘A hot tip for the Booker prize, Will Self’s Joycean tribute is a stream of consciousness tour de force.’ (Full review here.)

Metro:
‘A surprisingly moving story of common people crushed by the state.’


Walking to Hollywood: paperback of the year

The Independent has given Walking to Hollywood five stars in its paperbacks of 2011:

“The three essays collected in Walking to Hollywood are non-fictional travelogues that spiral slowly into abstraction, similar in many ways to the ‘psychogeography’ columns on which Will Self collaborated with Ralph Steadman.

“But here the tone is markedly different, the author’s usual Technicolor exuberance tempered by a monochrome melancholy. It is significant that Steadman’s illustrations have been displaced by the sort of black-and-white photographs beloved of WG Sebald; Self’s writing seems to have taken a darker turn under the German writer’s saturnine influence. Not that this book entirely lacks the old scatological mischief. Sebald, after all, is unlikely to have described car exhausts as ‘turbofarts’.”

Walking to Hollywood reviews

The Sunday Times: “In Very Little, the first in this triptych of wacky tales rooted in autobiographical reality but twisted through gonzo distortions, Self recalls an outrageously funny friend (a dwarf, with whose sister he had embarrassing teenage sex at a party). The Hollywood in the title story is a nightmare of video games and scientology where Self morphs into a female porn star and the Incredible Hulk. The last tale is a grey affair about coastal erosion, after which Self explains that the three have been themed around obsessionality, psychosis and dementia respectively. The effect is hallucinogenic, paranoid and gruellingly clever.”

The Guardian: “Scattered photographs, odd domestic details, a filthy reference to Margaret Atwood’s remote-book-signing device the LongPen: there are traces of reality in Walking to Hollywood but they are like the frantic nail-furrows of a cartoon character scrabbling on a rock-face before plunging into the void. Will Self ‘s psychogeographical (the geographical is not always a given) ramblings are split into three parts: “Very Little”, an account of the narrator’s relationship with achondroplastic dwarf and art-superstar Sherman Oaks “Walking to Hollywood”, an exhausting Los Angeles odyssey where everyone is played by an actor (Self is both David Thewlis and Pete Postlethwaite) and most affectingly, “Spurn Head”, the record of a coastal walk with a grimly inevitable rest-stop at its end. In the afterword, Self says each part represents a mental pathology – obsessive compulsive disorder, psychosis, Alzheimer’s – but these are subtle divisions in a book that examines the human brain with a scalpel in one hand, a brick in the other, and a lit firework between its teeth.”

The Independent: “Self’s latest work has its roots in the once fashionable notion that walking is a radical act. In this triptych of surreal tales that come dressed as memoir, Self takes on the role of loquacious author-narrator. In “Very Little”, he describes his relationship with celebrated sculptor and dwarf, Sherman Oakes, who aged 13 threatened to walk into the local bakery stripped naked except for a skullcap and attachE case. In the centrepiece, “Walking to Hollywood”, Self walks across LA, only to realise that he’s part of a movie and that every character he meets is played by a celebrity. Finally in “Spurn Head”, he tramps the coast of East Yorkshire, finding in the crumbling cliffs an extended metaphor for what he suspects is the early on-set of Alzheimer’s.”

The Observer: “Travelogue, film criticism and autobiography are among the genres fused in this surreal narrative, in which a neurotic Self-alike tries to shake off his obsessive-compulsive disorder by taking a trip to Los Angeles to find out who or what ‘killed film’ (the suspects include Sony, CGI and Mike Myers). After resuming a rivalrous childhood friendship with a 3ft-tall sculptor, he brawls with Daniel Craig’s stunt double, mutates into the Incredible Hulk, and wakes to find that he’s developed the breasts of the Mulholland Drive star Laura Harring. Essayistic interludes punctuate the action: there’s a bracing take on the Polanski affair, and many funny riffs about the effortful artifice film-making involves. When the narrator learns that air traffic controllers were flown to Pinewood Studios “to play the parts of the air traffic controllers” in the film United 93, he can’t help thinking of the ‘air traffic controllers who had ensured those air traffic controllers landed safely, so that they could pretend to be witnessing the feigned destruction of real bodies’.

“Jollity and gloom collide: the darker material, which draws on the author’s history of drug addiction and the death of his mother, brings to mind Bret Easton Ellis’s eerie memoir-thriller Lunar Park, a novel that Self is shown reading. Ellis himself pops up, along with several other writers who have come to LA to beg for work, including a tramp who turns out to be Salman Rushdie. A drolly emphatic disclaimer warns against mistaking these names for their real-life counterparts – which is probably just as well, given what Self writes about Toni Morrison.

“Extravagant prose is inevitably a stand-out feature of the book. The first vowel of the word ‘descended’ appears 523 times in order to evoke Norman Bates’s super-slo-mo knife attack in Douglas Gordon’s art installation 24-Hour Psycho. Although Self’s alter-ego frets about the ‘arrant nonsense’ of his style, there’s plenty to enjoy here, especially the 26-word compound adjective with which he memorably vents spleen at a gabby jet passenger.

“The fear of early-onset dementia haunts Self’s return to London, and he promptly embarks on a walking tour of the fast-eroding Yorkshire coast. At one point, he asks a local for directions to the next village. “Ahv no ahdeah”, comes the reply. Some readers may feel the same way about this bizarro hotchpotch – but if you’re prepared to accept its eccentricity, much fun awaits.”

The Independent on Sunday: “Will Self ‘s Walking to Hollywood consists of three skewed travelogues, in which truth bleeds bafflingly into fiction. Of Self’s previous work, it is perhaps closest in spirit to his erstwhile ‘psychogeography’ column for The Independent, in which he professed to unpick the ‘relationship between psyche and place’. But if those articles were often little more than scatological jeux d’esprit, this is a darker and more serious affair.

Not that Self’s usual exuberance is entirely absent. Reading the title essay, which documents his perambulations around downtown LA, is like watching a dirty-minded cartoonist doodle on a postcard, turning famous sights into obscene tableaux: the Incredible Hulk comes to life and starts rutting with the cars along Miracle Mile.

“Elsewhere, however, the book strikes a different tone. In ‘Very Little’, Self tramps the gloomy South Downs with a megalomaniac dwarf ‘Spurn Head’ recounts a hike along the crumbling Yorkshire coastline. Elliptical and unsettling, these two pieces suggest an intriguing shift in Self’s work, from the colourful surrealism of William Burroughs to something more akin to WG Sebald as in Sebald’s Vertigo, captionless black-and-white photographs embed the text, and dead-eyed doppelgangers abound.

“Walking to Hollywood ultimately fuses physical and psychological landscapes in ways that are unique, making it utterly Selfish – but in a good way.”

About / Contact

will-self.com is the official website for British novelist and journalist Will Self. The site is managed by Chris Hall and Chris Mitchell.

If you want to get in touch, you can email us at info@will-self.com

All email will be read, but we can’t guarantee a response.

PR agencies, please DO NOT put this email address on any mailing lists.

If you have a specific request for Will regarding commissions, book rights etc, you can contact his agent via agent@will-self.com

Will’s Writing Room

Will's Writing Room
– a 360 degree view in 71 photos

Recent Posts