Will Self can be absurd and obnoxious — but also highly entertaining and insightful
Will Self has been warning of the death of the novel for years, so it might be heartening for him to consider that the release of his new novel The Quantity Theory of Morality has been accompanied by a flurry of interviews.
Or maybe not. The interviewers are less interested in Self’s work than in Self’s self — the cantankerous opinions, sardonically delivered, and the colourful life.
Then again, what’s new? Self has always been a celebrity as well as a writer. You would not have caught JG Ballard doing drugs on the Prime Minister’s plane but you would have been even less likely to see him as a panellist on Shooting Stars.
Self might hate social media but he is the kind of quote machine who was destined to go viral whether or not he liked it. His recent interviews contain more viral potential than a Wuhan lab.
This has led to heated responses online. Self-hatred is common among Britain’s literati — because of Self’s unpleasant divorce (from the columnist Deborah Orr), and his overbearing manner, and his habit of saying things that sound a bit pompous, like that the novel is dying.
That said, for all that he has courted controversy and performed in popular culture, Self has always been a writer in a concrete sense. He has been prolific as a novelist and essayist — and he has always been ambitious and independent-minded. No one who wanted to maximise their readers would have written Umbrella. Indeed, one gets the sense that Self was almost daring people not to read the book.
If so, he got his wish. But the sad truth is that Self has been correct. Far fewer people are reading literary novels. Social media has nuked our attention spans. The fact that Self has become an online punching bag without — unlike, say, Martin Amis — even writing a really bad book is proof enough of that.
I’m ashamed to say it but I was going to write this little appreciation of one of Britain’s finest modern novelists without even reading his book. Who has the time? I’ve got tweets to read, damn it.
But I’m glad that curiosity — or self-disgust — got in the way. For all that his books can seem unwelcoming, Self has always been a highly entertaining and provocative author — from the chilling The Quantity Theory of Insanity to the surreal and densely comic The Book of Dave. He is a serious author, yet for all of his imperious and condemnatory opinions, he has never been so self-important as to let his prose become austere. I was a fan even as an awkward adolescent — rudely expecting him to sign a dog-eared copy of My Idea of Fun rather than his latest book. (He was baffled but good enough not to be patronising.)
The Quantity Theory of Morality, too, is richly entertaining and provocative — a satire on middle-class manners that makes other satires on middle-class manners look hopelessly mannered. A group of ageing bourgeois friends, whose friendship has the depth of an Egyptian puddle, is considered from various contemptuous perspectives. Their superficial niceness, for Self, is symptomatic of a deeper moral failing — a failure to appreciate what morality even is.
Here, and elsewhere in the modern world, niceness has been confused with goodness. Self’s recurring character Dr Zack Busner appears, in his dotage, to lament the “lazy emotivism” of the middle classes:
… they don’t know much about morality, but they know what sorts of actions they personally like – y’know, the ones that make them feel good, and they regard these as estimable, just as they regard those who perform these actions that make them feel good as, de facto, good people.
That the book has been informed by Self’s anger towards the friends who abandoned him after that unpleasant divorce is as obvious as the greenness of the grass. “While you’re riding high, your friends are only too happy to offer you a helping hand, but once you’re in genuine need, you won’t see them for carpet fluff.” That said, I suspect he would have framed his critique of social media censoriousness just as scathingly whatever his circumstances. Freud said “no one feels too guilty for long about a bad act they’ve committed,” we’re told, “Just so long as they haven’t been found out. The web is all about not-being-found-out.”
It is a virtue of Self’s fiction that you never know where his satirical blade is going to swing next. Indeed, just as in films there is often a moment, after a swordsman has struck, when it is unclear what limb, belonging to which person, is going to fall off, it is sometimes unclear who is being satirised. In one chapter, the friends all seem to be female. But are they? On one level, Self is lampooning what he sees as paranoia among gender-critical feminists (“How can I possibly feel safe with… with… this – this… person in my house, in my bathroom even”). On another, “Willa”, for a novelist named “Will” has been haunting the book, is an ambiguous figure, desperate to transcend a “bullying male persona” with “life-affirming, supremely legible” books with titles like Swipe Right for Love. There are many layers and shades of neuroses here.
The strained niceness of “the gang” — sometimes described more sick-makingly as “our little gang” — is ultimately reflected in the emergence of a perverse fascist state in which the twee is combined with the totalitarian. Britain is ruled by a party called “The Nationalist Trust” and Dvořák plays while travellers are interrogated by the sinister representatives of the “Home Office Visitor Inspection Service” (“HOVIS”). This unfortunately exposition-clogged chapter does not do as good a job of mocking British tweedophilia as, say, Fred Sculthorp in these pages. There are, I accept, elements of the nationalist right which seem to think that Britain could erect the authoritarian institutional apparatus that it would take for comprehensive ethnic cleansing and then sink into a placid bucolic state. But most Britons who, say, find the idea of a boat called “Boaty McBoatface” hilarious are of the unreflective universalist cast of mind that sees prejudice as the highest form of villainy. (Even the National Trust seems desperate to emphasise that its country homes were founded on more evil than the house from The Amityville Horror.)
Self is the kind of self-styled radical whose unwillingness to accept that they share a lot of the same opinions, in broad terms, as the hated liberal bourgeoisie means that they must present such people as being not just empty-headed but black-hearted. Scratch an Ed Davey voter, find a fascist, or what have you. I don’t think this is the case, or that the oikophobic asides in these pages (“London, is, was, and always will be, one of the dark places of the earth”) are edgier than a football.
Yet it is a pleasure, or at least a challenge, to argue with Self — someone who can impress, inform, amuse or surprise the reader whatever their eventual conclusions. His linguistic experiments can be strange and, on occasion, rather nauseating (“meat juice squirting from that impressive pork sword”). But they are never dull and often combine novelty with precision. In an age of prose that is tedious enough that it is imitable and replaceable by AI, this is something to value. “What is the hack,” asks Self, “If not someone who sells himself again and again, in plain, good, ordinary, readily comprehended prose?” Quite. Ouch.
Disdain for mere niceness comes easily to people who are not terribly nice. Still, there is a lot of truth to the idea that we have replaced character with social graces, and moral language with the terminology of emotional wellbeing and mental health. We’ve been able to clap for the NHS, and broadcast our “mental health awareness”, without having to make major sacrifices or commitments. (Such shallow thinking is by no means exclusive to the liberal middle classes. Look at how resentful anti-feminists will wring their hands about the romantic failures of “nice guys” as if surface-level politeness represented personal substance.)
Of course, one reason we avoid moral language is that it is difficult and contestable. Self’s allusions to the goddamn rich, (man who are using coltan (dude) are a bit limp when it comes to attempting to imagine an alternative ethical discourse. Don’t get me wrong: conflict minerals are a serious issue to address. But it has been a long time since smartphones and laptops were indicative of wealth. Tens of millions of people in the DRC itself have smartphones. Still, it is good that Self’s combative nature means that he raises — or, rather, sneers and yells — such questions. To have serious ethical discourse at all, we need voices who relish the uncomfortable.
Self’s personal morality — fiercely denounced online — is not for me to judge, because I don’t know the man or the people he has known. It is not to trivialise its local significance — because the local really can be significant — to observe that discussion of Hemingway, or Bellow, or De Beauvoir is not required to contain a judgement on their personal lives. As Kenneth Tynan rightly said, a critic is not compelled to know how to drive.
Self is a social critic before he is anything, but he is a truly creative and ambitious one. You don’t have to agree with him on, say, the spiritual impoverishment of society wrought by digitalisation. But you should at least read him rather than confirming his critique with easy talk of soundbites, gossip and old TV.
