Customer Reviews

Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe

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Will Self is sui generis, there is no one like him. He has plied his weird, surrealist trade in fiction and journalism for a while now, but I think this book tops his others in the bizarre stakes. Personally, I didn't think it was as good as his three previous short story collections: The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Grey Area and Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys.

About half the book is taken up with the title story which pits Hindu against Jew, junior against senior psychiatrist who send each other deranged patients under the auspices of requesting a second opinion. Mukti, jealous and angry at the ludicrous, arrogant tele-psychiatrist Busner, becomes convinced that he is being controlled by a cabal of psychiatrists, led by Busner, determined to undermine him. All sinews of sanity are unravelled by the end of the story.

After that there is a mixed bag of short stories. 161 is written in the shadow of Ballard, the grey area of a tower block in Liverpool. A pensioner befriends a youth, threatened by gang men, and despite seeming to be a vulnerable incontinent old man, he keeps his real intentions close to his chest. The story, as revealed in the acknowledgements, was commissioned as part of a Liverpool Housing project. Self actually wrote the piece from a Liverpool tower that was about to be demolished which reveals an interesting desire on behalf of the author to fuse his work with the real world in interesting and original ways.

The Five-Swing Walk, set amongst the scrubby park areas of South London is a bleak, dark meditation on fatherhood. A weekend visiting rights father takes his son to the swings, and becomes disturbed by the nightmarish responsibilities of his role. This is the darkest piece of the lot.

Cheer yourself up somewhat with Conversations with Ord about two lonely middle aged men who conduct a friendship based on visceral hatred and imaginative conceits - mental games of Go-Chess, and pretending to be Ord, a general in his 80s. They discuss the notion of going up in a hot air balloon, stationed over Vauxhall Bridge.

The final piece, Return to the Planet of the Humans, is little more than a coda to Self's earlier novel, Great Apes.