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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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