Will Self

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.

What we’d miss about Scotland

‘Try visualising the Union Jack without the Saltire, which is just a fancy way of saying imagine the British flag without its Scottish component. It looks pretty weird: just a bunch of red lines radiating across a white field like a burst blood vessel. But if, by some caprice of the old gods, the Scots vote on 18 September to leave the Union, that’s what the rest of us will have flying over us. If the metaphoric implications are disturbing enough, what about the symbolic ones? For that red-legged-spider-for-a-flag will also be relaying a chilling fact – with Scotland gone it’ll be just us… and the Welsh.

‘It’s my belief that as an individual correlate of the collective imperial drive, every Englishman either chooses or is allocated a Celtic nation. Left to my own devices, I would’ve gone for Ireland: its people are poetic, fey and hard-drinking with a vicious streak when roused and a fine 20th-century modernist literary tradition, so you can see the suitability of the match. But it was not to be – my brother nabbed Hibernia very effectively by moving there in the early Nineties, so faute de mieux I took Scotland instead. Granted, I got the better deal when it comes to landscape – but when we consider the human factor, things are a little more problematic. Over the past 20 years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Scotland. I should say an average of at least a month a year – which is probably more than Sean Connery, the Greatest Living Scotsman, has managed (of whom, more later) – and on that basis I’d like to offer you my view of what exactly it is we’ll be losing should the Scots opt to pack up their sporrans and go.

‘It was David Bowie who got me thinking this way. Back in February, speaking through his bizarre – but easy on the hand – Kate Moss glove puppet at the Brits, the Greatest Living Englishman issued a cryptic cri de brave-coeur: “Scotland stay with us!” It was the first time I’d heard anyone on either side of the debate allude to the loss some 54 million English would experience should the five million-odd (some very odd) Scots go their own way.

‘Mostly, the media has banged on about how the poor independent wee nation will suffer a terrible buffeting as it tries to plot a course in the vicious currents of international capital flows; how the dosh will be sucked out of its economy faster than oil gushing from a North Sea field; and how its sheepish folk will be wandering in the fiscal wilderness once they’ve been deprived of our sterling currency. I want to redress that balance, but I won’t be cataloguing all the obvious Scottishery. There’s no place in this article – and arguably in the world – for kilts, claymores, the Krankies and bigoted Australians with blue-painted faces.

‘No, I want to give you the authentic Scotland, and to that end I want you to picture me as I was on the first day of June this year, driving at some speed along the B871 through the desolate moonscape of Sutherland, one of the northernmost counties of this hyperborean realm, en route for the Garvault Hotel, an establishment that styles itself “Britain’s most remote hotel”. This is the true Highlands, a vast and empty realm, devoid of population since the early 19th century, when in pursuit of woolly profits, the so-called Red Duke of Sutherland and his duchess slung their tenants off the land. All that goes on here now is toffs stalking deer, men of a certain age trout fishing and huge semi-trailers roaring along the patchy roads hauling southerners’ fresh-cut tax breaks – sorry, I mean “timber”. There’s nothing picturesque about central Sutherland unless, that is, your favourite paintings are the mineralised landscapes of the surrealist Max Ernst.

‘And fortunately mine are. As I drove and drove and drove some more, my spirits rose. In our right, tightly-populated little island, it’s heartening to realise that these extensive wastes still exist; you could release thousands of cracked-up southern ne’er-do-wells and conniving wanker-bankers into these bleakly peaty hills and never see any of them ever again.

‘Packed into our urban battery farms, we need at least a background awareness of this free-ranging opportunity – even if we never avail ourselves of it. Pulling up at the turning to Garvault, I read on the hotel sign “non-residents welcome” and burst into laughter. The very idea of it! As if anyone would undertake a minimum two-hour-round drive in order to eat and drink at what must – Scotland being the country it indubitably is – be an establishment typified by madly surly service and tinned soup.

‘Perhaps the best contemporary debunking of Scotland’s pretensions to be a premium holiday destination has to’ve been the Scots hotel sketch on Little Britain. Like all its sketches, it follows a tight formula: in this case, Matt Lucas plays the gullible English guest and David Walliams the gurning, flute-playing, off-with-the-fairies proprietor of a godforsaken hostelry. Welcoming Lucas in with nods, winks and mad insinuations, Walliams then introduces the unusual menu delights enquiring: “Have you heard of such a thing as… soup?” or bread, or tomatoes, or indeed any other food staple, the point being that in the straitened culinary atmosphere of Scotland, such things are indeed astonishing exotica.’

Read the rest of this article at Esquire magazine.

Front Row

Listen to Will talking about Shark on Radio 4’s Front Row last night, 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.

On Crossrail

‘Far be it from me to come over all Freudian, but there has to be latent significance in the manifestation of a group of men boring through the ground inside a giant, phallic-shaped machine with a woman’s name. And not just one group of men: we’re talking eight, for eight phallic-shaped machines, all of which bear women’s names.

‘True, to be fair to the Crossrail project, there are women working these big drilling dicks as well – the evening before I visited the Crossrail site in east London I watched the The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway on BBC2, and the senior engineer working on the particularly tricky job of tunnelling under the Thames was a woman, as was her deputy. However, for now, I suspect these are the exceptions that prove the rule: the grands projets of the built environment have a tendency to be pushed forward by a distinctively masculine combination of grandiosity, obsessive single-mindedness and either brute or mechanical strength.

‘And, as projects go, they don’t get much grander than Crossrail. I’m not going to bore into you with the statistics here – God knows they’ve been dinned into you enough already; really as noisy background justification for the fact that the vast amount of that £15bn comes out of London taxpayers’ pockets. What exactly are we getting for our buck? Why, big, phallic-shaped machines banging into Mother Earth, that’s what.

‘Oh, and if you’re not happy with my psychoanalytic take on it, why not hearken to what Terry Morgan, the Crossrail chairman, sold to me as the benefit of the new railway while I was taking my trousers off in front of him. (Purely, I might add, in order that I could put some high-vis ones on before we went down his hole together.) According to Terry – a bluff, genial, highly likable fellow, who’s spent the greater part of his career in the arms industry – once Crossrail is up and running, it will cut journey times from Reading to the City by 30 whole minutes; not only that, but the harassed commuters won’t have to change trains, they can just sit there playing Angry Birds, or reading the FT the entire time.’

Read the rest of Will’s piece for Guardian Cities here.

The madness of crowds: Crowdfunding

Some guy in some 0.1-horse town in the ass-end of America’s great nowhere put up a crowdfunding appeal on the web: “I want to bake an apple pie for my mom but I don’t have the money to do it.” A couple of days later there was $49,000 in his bank account. I like to think he’ll now bake many, many apple pies and deliver them widely throughout the States to the needy – like some Johnny Apple-Pie-Seed, but in all probability he’ll just trouser the cash.

At least part of the appeal of crowdfunding (or so the boosters proclaim) is that it enables ideas to get off the ground, whether for businesses or creative endeavours, that would otherwise lie down and die in the mud. The web seems to make possible the conditions necessary for the cultivation of what James Surowiecki characterised – in his 2004 book of the same name – as the wisdom of crowds.

Surowiecki was initially inspired by Francis Galton’s revealing anecdote about how the aggregated guesses of a crowd at a country fair more accurately identified the weight of a slaughtered ox than the prediction of any one expert. Surowiecki built on this to identify optimal factors for crowd wisdom: 1. Diversity of opinion – it doesn’t matter what information this is based on, the important thing is that it should be private to the individual. 2. Independence – individuals’ opinions should be free from the taint of groupthink. 3. Decentralisation – in forming their opinion, individuals should draw on specific, local knowledge. 4. Aggre­gation – a mechanism exists that can take all these individual judgements and turn them into a collective decision.

The web, at least in theory, enshrines these optimal factors in its very constitution, which is presumably why crowdfunding has become such a Big Thing. You can now crowdfund films or music albums; venture capitalists have organised crowd equity funding for company start-ups, and wanker-bankers have adapted the model to make it possible for both individuals and corporate entities with a bad credit profile to raise loans nonetheless. It has been calculated by a UK-based wonk tank that during one month this year, $60,000 was raised worldwide every single hour through crowdfunding. By anyone’s estimation that’s a lot of apple pie. In the heady realm of US electoral finance, crowdfunding has been entrenched since Barack Obama used it in his campaign to wrest the White House from the would-be successor to the pixie-eared reader of The Little Goat.

My suspicion is that the efficacy of crowdfunding will in fact decline in inverse correlation to its success. Put differently: the more money that’s raised, the less wise will be the crowd that raises it. I call this theory – contra Surowiecki – “The Idiocy of the $49,000 Apple Pie”. Here’s how the web works to produce such dumb collective judgements: 1. Homogeneity of opinion – the apple-pie funders’ opinions are based securely on information common to them all: apple pies are yummy, moms are great and it’s nice to make apple pies for moms. 2. Conformity – simply by spending enough time on the web to become aware that some schmuck has posted such a crowdfunding appeal, these people are exhibiting a worrisome conformism. 3. Centralisation – also termed “googlisation”, this is a function of the way commercially oriented search engines act as positive feedback mechanisms to pump-prime consumer (or donor) demand. 4. Aggregation – this is the only proposition my theory shares with Surowiecki’s; I agree with him that the web can take all these individual judgements and turn them into a collective decision.

The problem is that the myriad individual decisions are resolutely crap ones. Why? Because there is a suppressed premise in all of this. True, apple pie is yummy; most moms are great; moms do indeed deserve to have apple pies made for them by penurious offspring. However, the offspring do not deserve to have their donor pie in effect made for them many times over simply because they have access to the web. To begin with, such $49,000 apple pies will be the outliers of crowdfunding appeals, but in time – due to the underlying dynamics – they will increase in number, until the total crowdfunding pie will be divided up between a few such specious enterprises; then the whole thing will collapse in a puff of pixels.

The confirmation of the beginning of the end of crowdfunding was presented to me just a few days after I read about the $49,000 apple pie in USA Today. I was strolling along the promenade at Venice Beach admiring the weathered skins of the sun-and-marijuana-baked hobos, when a leaflet was thrust into my hand. “Donate one dollar so we can raise a million dollars to make a movie!” the thruster cried – and when I read the leaflet it cried the same thing. This was crowdfunding taken back to the streets, trying to re-create the conditions demanded by Surowiecki’s theory by decoupling it from the web altogether. Naturally, the crowd was far too wise to engage with such arrant bullshitting, and there were many discarded leaflets papering the asphalt. After all, while the wannabe film producers thought they were engaging in a novel and democratised form of financing, the crowd saw their efforts for the timeless phenomenon they were: begging.

‘Jaws without the Shark’

‘A couple of years ago, when I was in the closing stages of working on my last novel, Umbrella, I began casting around for a new subject for the next one. I greatly admire WG Sebald’s The Emigrants, which tells the stories of six refugees from the Nazis without heavy-handedly describing the mechanics of the persecution that the regime visited on Jews, gay people and the politically suspect. Following this pattern, I conceived of writing a novel about some of the more interesting characters I had known during my two decades in the netherworld of drug addiction. I would fictionalise their stories, of course, but more importantly, I would never mention, or otherwise allude to, the reasons why these people lost jobs, experienced relationship-breakdown, moved abroad, and went to hospital or jail. Their addiction would remain a strange sort of absence, deforming the course of their lives but never emerging into the full light of day. My working rubric for the novel was “Jaws without the shark”.

‘I began by interviewing the woman with whom I’d begun using heroin in the late 1970s – she has, thankfully, long since cleaned up from the drug, and has a sharp and incisive angle on the soft, psychic underbelly that insulated her from the sordid realities of her active addiction. At the same time, I read Peter Benchley’s Jaws and watched Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of the novel. I’m not altogether sure why I did this, beyond a background suspicion that I might find something usable in this material. In the event, what struck me hard was a discrepancy between the film’s script (which Benchley himself worked on), and the text of the novel.

‘In the film, an important scene takes place when Quint, the Ahab-like, obsessive shark-hunter, and Hooper, the cuddly marine biologist and shark expert, face off in the lurching cabin of Quint’s fishing boat, the Orca. Intent on out-machismoing each other, the two engage in an unusual duel that consists of comparing their shark-inflicted scars. Quint reveals that he was a sailor on board the USS Indianapolis when it was sunk by a Japanese submarine in the last days of the second world war in the Pacific. Hooper knows all about the Indianapolis: the 900-odd shipwrecked survivors, cast adrift in the ocean between Guam and Leyte as they floated on inadequate life rafts, or paddled through the heaving swell in water-logged life jackets, were the victims of the worst shark attack ever recorded. Due to some communications snafu it took three days for rescuers to arrive, and by then there were 321 survivors – one of whom was Quint.’

Read the rest of Will’s account of how and why he wrote his new novel, Shark (published by Penguin), at the Guardian here.

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