Spineless Reviews

Tough, tough reading

Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, by Will Self

£6.99, Penguin (1999)

I wish I didn’t like Will Self so much. I wish he wouldn’t, for example, use “gifted” to mean “given” (although I tip my hat at him for using it when it’s appropriate). And, while I’m wishing for improbables, can I wish for a Scalextric, some Space Lego, and a brand new set of die-cast cars?

This collection of Self’s stories takes its title from an advertising slogan for Tonka Toys. The appropriation of this and countless other chunks of pop target Self squarely at the demographic which twats on about Bagpuss and Roobarb and Custard. Not, admittedly, at the vapid twenty-somethings whose mental processes start and stop with reciting a list of childhood TV references; instead the psychological make-up of the Self fan is the thirty-something (in my case, late twenty-something—and besides, the reviewer is always exempt from his own generalisations) who sees Nirvana’s greatest hits coming out and is gripped with fear. The hunt begins for something that both speaks on the wavelength of the contents-settled 30-year-old, and is still dangerous and avant-garde.

Self is normally reasonably dangerous, and bares his teeth frequently in Tough, Tough Toys…. As a social commentator he ranks with the unashamed like Chris Morris and Jeremy Hardy. But his insistence on tying his work to the stock-in-trade of the provocateur (eg. prison and drug slang, sounding hollow in the mouths of Tembe and Danny in the first and last stories; or the speed-freak in the eponymous story, compiled—like a Julie Burchill column—just to raise the hackles on the sensitive reader) knits hairline cracks into his work. Consequently bits of it (Dave Too, Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual) fall apart like the crumbly money-spinner in The Rock of Crack as Big as The Ritz. Self’s writing, stripped of its bombast, vocabulary and cute references, is astonishingly variable for someone so accomplished. When it’s good, it’s the wry Story For Europe or bizarre, finely-turned sci-fi Caring, Sharing; when it’s bad (most obviously Dave Too), it’s a dribble of A-level standard pseud, good writing if all you’ve ever read includes none of Self’s influences or contemporaries.

A shame, then, that Self’s best work is still his debut The Quantity Theory of Insanity. Occasionally the newer stories, in here and anthologies such as Grey Area, reach as high as his first efforts. But you could easily edit most of his work since that smashing beginning into a single book, all of it tight and astonishing. For the life of me I can’t see why he hasn’t.

posted at: 10:13 | path: / s / self_will | permanent link to this entry

All cock and browned off

Cock and Bull, by Will Self

£7.99, Penguin (1993)

Anyone who’s read Palahniuk’s Guts will recognise that feeling. It starts as an itchy twitch in the tummy, then a desire to squirm in one’s seat. The mouth either gets pulled back towards the ears or into a moue of distaste. Buttocks clench and this passes down to the legs which fidget in all directions, as the eyes are drawn inexorably to the next paragraph on. Being grossed out, bodily: from head to dirty-feeling toes.

In this combination of two novellas, Self expands on the idea of gradual or sudden genital acquisition. Cock concerns itself with a woman who slowly grows a penis; a vagina behind a man’s knee is the subject of Bull. The stories are visceral and ugly, often portraying their cast at their most insensitive or sinister. Their humour is bleak and barbed, and to feel that Self might not commit to some overarching theme is to miss the fact that he is applying his energies elsewhere.

The stories resist easy Freudian analysis, or overapplication of gender mooing—courageously, considering their subject matter—although everything succumbs to a hammer if you hit it hard enough, of course. Carol’s personality changes are as much a movement into the personality space her husband vacates, as a response to her new organs; John’s feminization consists of blind, utilitarian actions, not castration fears. But the strength of these stories is in their portrayal of typical people (if generally more neurotic than most) handling situations ineptly and messily. The hapless victim of “John Bull” is named so as to universalize his situation. Weakly Kafkaesque in their attempt to accumulate humour—and the casting of Bull as a farce confirms this—they fare much better when not compared to any of Self’s heroes.

All this, as usual, takes place entirely in spite of Self’s grandiloquence and tangled verbiage. These stories succeed on their own merits, as if they had been written by someone else and poorly related by a copywriter who has never seen a sentence to know how they actually work; or, worse, never seen a bad sentence to know how they don’t. The thickets and thorns he dumps around these two tales only do harm, especially the pointless narrator’s scenes in Cock added apparently only for a bit of obvious symbolism, and to be able to end the story neatly. You often wonder whether Self had a reason for writing in this forced, pretentious way; or whether, ironically, he stumbled from one word to the next, with no more plan than his protagonists.

posted at: 15:46 | path: / s / self_will | permanent link to this entry

Silt life

Waterland, by Graham Swift

£6.99, Picador

Tom Crick is in trouble. His wife has committed a miserable and foolish crime: precipitated by events long past; precipitating Crick’s dismissal from his post as a history teacher. The school’s headmaster has finally been given the excuse to downsize humanities in favour of the sciences, and Crick’s backlash is the generation-spanning tapestry of Waterland. Where scientific principles might never have helped him, Crick develops his own view of progress and the advancement of time: civilization, and the existence of each civilized man, is nothing more than the excavation of accumulated silt, the continuous fight against nature to prevent dirt from blocking life, love and intelligent thought.

Supporting this gloomy but inevitable conclusion are the multiple strands of Crick’s family history, the history and development of the fenland where his and his wife’s families have lived for generations, and even the course of English and world histories. Swift, narrating as Crick, develops themes on business big and small, transport and the folly of great schemes into a crescendo that focus history on the single act of Crick’s wife, and the parallel events some twenty years ago involving Crick’s educationally subnormal brother.

A seamless mixture of human endeavour on both the large and small scale, Waterland is occasionally let down by the indeterminacy of one of its major conceits: to whom is Crick preaching his message? To the converted? The unconverted? The eternally apostate? To bring this in line with the ultimate recipients of the speech—children, dear children—Swift has had to execute appropriately quick turnarounds, and it is here that the story hiccups. But this is a minor fault, observed retrospectively, and for most of the novel the reader is drawn inexorably, like mud down the Ouse to the open sea, to a bleak, lonely and watery conclusion.

posted at: 17:50 | path: / s / swift_graham | permanent link to this entry

Man in plain view

The Rediscovery of Man, by Cordwainer Smith

£6.99, Gollancz

Cordwainer Smith is one of those secrets that everyone who’s anyone knows about: in this case, a smibboleth. Made more mysterious by his pseudonym (curiously not yet derided as the expansion of Iain M. Banks’ name has been) and the posthumous destruction of his notebooks by his widow, the Cordwainer myth is in danger of eclipsing his work altogether.

This is unfortunate, as a brief reading of Smith’s stunning SF work shows. The Rediscovery of Man is an anthology of a number of his short stories. Drawing on the style of Chinese legend—learnt during his formative years with his father, legal advisor to Sun Yat-sen—Smith builds into his stories a timelessness and a depth of human emotion and character rare in such stories. His characters, more than his plot devices or technical specifications, leap from the pages and begin to tell you the story themselves.

The shorts are occasionally variable in quality, and where Smith most obviously borrows from Chinese myth (The Dead Lady of Clown Town and The Ballad of Lost C’mell, and the opening paragraphs to other stories) he loses his own voice: the nuts and bolts start to show at these points, and the reader is briefly lost as form and content begin to come apart. This aside, though, Smith’s style is stunning and has a brevity whose loss, in the face of infodumps and pedestrian Gibsonisms, is to be mourned.

Much is made of Smith’s self-consistent universe which spans millennia of history (and the ashes of all those notebooks). Again, this seems to be missing the point: plenty of great authors haven’t seen the need to invent whole other universes, and it’s unclear why relentless comparisons of the size, scope, shape or logic of such plans leads to universe envy among so many practitioners of Smith’s genre. Rather, Smith succeeds because he winds a thread through his imagined history, and ultimately does not ruminate on imagined events, but on the human reaction to these: the commonality of rumination, leading the race of man to its rediscovery.

posted at: 20:55 | path: / s / smith_cordwainer | permanent link to this entry

Looking for a good idea

My Idea of Fun, by Will Self

£6.99, Penguin (1993)

There’s something wrong with Ian Wharton. His idea of fun is a bit, well… let’s just say it’s probably not the same as yours. He’s a bit unstable and pretty introverted; but then you might be too, if you could conjure up an internal, eidetic universe and fly through it at will, peeking into the dorms at Roedean and stealing watches from people’s pockets, all in the blink of an eye. And The Fat Controller isn’t helping matters, teaching him the secrets of the universe and how to cure his spots with alchemy, while killing theatre-goers with a curare-tipped hypodermic. So when Dr Gyggle steps in with some empiricism-as-therapy, Ian thinks it’s for the best; but the little devil at the controls of his brain hopes that things will get far, far worse.

Forget everything you’ve heard about Self’s verbosity and pretentiousness: when he gets to work he crackles and flexes with energy, and you can see the muscles rippling under the surface. He’s thrilling and relentless, and can turn a quirky, back-of-the-bookshop theme into something with the emotional weight of a legal blockbuster.

So why is this outing so unsatisfying?

My Idea of Fun is subtitled “A Cautionary Tale”, but is Self paying attention? He’s cut free of what’s typically sneered at as “conventional morality”: no fault in itself, but Self lazily fills the gap with the modern, meaty, bloody equivalent of good-guy-duels-with-bad-guy, which is to say guy-butchers-guy. It’s no exaggeration to say that, when the narrator offhandedly mentions that he once tore off a tramp’s head on an empty tube train and fucked the stump of the neck (I might as well let you in on that one: it happens two pages in and sets the tone for much of the novel) he’s both defining and succumbing to a recurring theme in literary circles, work which shocks above all else.

Self-as-author and Ian-as-narrator both seem to follow parallel courses along a universal myth of “amoral aesthetic leading to oblivion”: first we move through excess, then disgust, then blandness and finally to something utterly, inexplicably boring in its blatant attempts to provoke. What a writer, though: how supple, how lithe…. A shame all he’s doing is prancing round at the gym.

posted at: 20:04 | path: / s / self_will | permanent link to this entry

I want you to do me a favour

Last Orders, by Graham Swift

£7.99, Picador (1999)

(This review appeared in the ReadReverb newsletter, Dec 9, 2005, and on the ReadReverb website)

Family butcher, hard drinker, self-styled patriarch of his little local clique: it’s not for Bermondsey’s Jack Dodds to go gentle into that good night. But even he wouldn’t have expected his drinking mates to turn the long journey with his ashes to Margate into a tour of the furthest reaches of south-east England. There’s the gambler, the fighter, the undertaker and the car dealer (who’s Jack’s son and yet not Jack’s son); but where’s Amy, Jack’s long-suffering? Who’s she going to visit instead, and why would Jack never acknowledge their existence? What’s the big mystery of the camper van, and why would a man on his death-bed need a thousand pounds in cash? Did he really take it all with him?

Once again Swift has written a book which is as much about the English countryside as about its main players. Jack’s final journey takes us through Kent (the garden of England, as we’re often reminded), and almost everyone gets a chance to tell a section or two from their point of view. Through this multiplicity of voices little histories are made to hang off the big geography like beads off a rosary: a war memorial in Chatham rubs shoulders with hop fields on the south coast; the Black Prince makes a guest appearance; and horses gallop from Chepstow to Towcester, carrying the fortunes of everyone, not just Lucky Raysy. Mud, soil, sand and spray are all churned up and flung at the reader.

The plot is almost entirely played out by setting conflicting narratives against each other. Half a dozen people can tell the reader half a dozen different lies, and by assembling this patchwork one can work out what’s really happened. Sometimes the book-length warps of Last Orders are in danger of being smothered by this blanket of voices, but Swift is endlessly picking up the weft and pulling it in a new direction, and it turns out that nothing is ever truly lost: not the thread, nor the plot, nor the point, nor the characters’ own personal freedoms. Not even Jack, as at the hands of his friends he slowly becomes part of first this field and then that patch of sea… Albion to Albion… dust to dust.

posted at: 16:19 | path: / s / swift_graham | permanent link to this entry

You don’t have to be well-read to write here, but it helps

The Comforts of Madness, by Paul Sayer

OOP, Sceptre (1988)

Telling a story from the point of view of someone already dead is an established literary device: The Lovely Bones is one of the more recent examples of books using it. But in The Comforts of Madness Paul Sayer develops the (arguably) politically equivalent of having as his narrator the effectively dead, a catatonic who can’t communicate at all, but is merely receptive to the treatment he receives at the hands of others. And what bizarre treatment it is! From the woeful neglect of a hospital ward he’s moved to an experimental treatment centre which does its best to break him and reshape him. As the attempts to bring him out of his trance force him to retreat emotionally and mentally, the book hurtles along to its harrowing climax.

The book charts Peter’s descent through the mental health system. It’s a kind of histrionic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, hammering home the message that our treatment of the mentally ill is often based on a Foucauldian imposition of our will rather than any consideration of the patient’s wishes or interests. Unlike in Ken Kesey’s work, here every dial is turned up to its maximum voltage, and the activities of the custodians and guardians are genuinely disturbing: so disturbing, though, that the book rapidly loses any power to shock as a portrayal, however extreme, of genuine conditions. The lunatics may well have taken over asylum in alternative-therapy trials, but they’ve done it by not acting like lunatics, at any rate not in a way that would prompt the layman to boggle quite so much at them. Sayer is unable to capture the subtleties that might make such inversions seem feasible.

From the beginning, moreover, the book is hopelessly overwritten. One might excuse Peter’s internal monologue being one big trawl through a thesaurus, as a compensation for his inability to express himself. But it slowly becomes clear that everyone speaks in a laboured, convoluted, delicate, and often highfalutin manner: from our narrator to hospital porters to consultants and the mentally disturbed army major. This is a book that has been not writ but wrought, hour after hour, pummeled and hammered in an attempt to fashion it into a tool for a very specific job; instead, it has ended up merely flat and flimsy. In its convoluted, inescapable misery, The Comforts of Madness could be lazily tagged as “Kafkaesque”. But it’s easy to forget that Kafka would always place at the centre of his work a tough kernel of mockery, pouring forth stoic laughter in the face of the absurdity that he saw everywhere else. Only when one reads this book—the equivalent of Kafka with that core torn out of it—does one begin to appreciate the relative levity and relief that it would otherwise afford.

posted at: 11:19 | path: / s / sayer_paul | permanent link to this entry