Customer Reviews

Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A book with a single internal organ as its unifying theme. Excellent. I double-dog dare you to find a likable character in this collection of stories; I sure couldn't do it. The book, on the other hand, I liked- a lot. Will Self makes painfully clear how he feels about the human condition. We are gluttons, slowly poisoning ourselves with various toxins . . . er, intoxicants, and we are not terribly kind to those around us, and most notably to those closest to us. Each story has its own unique twists and turns. The first story puts us in a seedy bar in London, the smell of which nearly rises from the page. We are introduced to a sorry lot of lifelong (until death) patrons, each on his on leg of the journey to death by alcohol. The second story is about a woman dying of cancer who is suddenly cured just as she has chosen to end her own life. How will she treat this gift? Mad Men meets mythology in modern day London in "Prometheus." The final story reminds us that alcohol and cancer are not the only things that destroy the human liver. Here we meet addicts swirling down their own chosen drain. Will there be redemption? What do you think?

Self is obviously a bright man, and I'm certain that I missed a number of references and metaphors in Liver, still, I think this one is a keeper.

When I was a child, liver was widely promoted as an essential food for growing bodies, full of iron and other nutrients. My mother, wanting the best for her family, dutifully served us liver at least monthly. This was in the "clean your plate or else" era, and some nights I would be left sitting at the dinner table for an hour after the rest of the family had departed, facing a plateful of cold liver.
Needless to say, I never developed a taste for liver, but I have acquired a strong liking for Will Self's new book, Liver: A fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes. The four lobes in this case are four exquisitely crafted stories, loosely connected to one another through the Plantation Club, a seedy bar in London's Soho district.
In the first story, Foie Humain, we meet the bar's regulars: Val Carmichael, the filthy-mouthed proprietor, who uses a four-letter synonym for female genitalia like an accent mark over almost every other word he utters, and who bestows upon his regulars the nicknames by which we get to know them; Pete Stenning, "Martian," a printer known for his greenish hair; Dan Gillespie, "the Poof;" Neil Bolton, "the Extra," an actor once admired on the West End and in Hollywood; Philip McCluskey, "His Nibs," a tabloid columnist with a choirboy face, "celebrated on Fleet Street for the McCluskey Manoeuvre, which consisted of putting his drunken hand up a young woman's skirt, then falling unconscious with it clamped, vice-like, around her knickers;" Trouget, "the Tosher," a world-famous painter who had become cult figure; and Hillary Edmonds, the bar boy whose duties include serving as Val's companion outside of working hours.
Foie Humain is itself a painting, a wonderful captured-in-motion portrait of the down-and-outers who would have to rise by several degrees to reach the status of underbelly of society. Toward the end, though, it becomes an homage to a famous Damon Knight short story from 1950, which in turn became perhaps the best-known Twilight Zone episode ever.
Leberkn'del, the second story, tells of a woman dying from liver cancer who hopes to accelerate the process and end her suffering by visiting a doctor in Zurich who provides his patients with a box of chocolate truffles and a glass of something poisonous. As the doctor hands her the class with the words, "I must tell you that if you drink this you will die," she has a change of heart. Instead she embarks on a new life, suddenly symptom-free, and finds new pleasures in her life. But even as her new-found strength propels her into unexpected avenues and relationships, her connection to her daughter - an habitué of the Plantation Club and friend of Hillary Edmonds - disintegrates.
In Prometheus, we meet a modern-day advertising Titan whose silver tongue and sales ability is fueled by his connection with a griffon vulture that fulfills the role his ancestor did with the adman's mythological namesake, leaving his principal client, Zeus, and his lover, Athene, more than a little baffled. Prometheus' partner, Epimetheus, taking after his Platonic namesake's lack of foresight, provides the tenuous link to the Plantation.
Finally, in Birdy Num Num, a pathogen describes the fading lives of a pathetic group of addicts waiting for their Tuesday afternoon fix - "because, let's face it, it's always Tuesday afternoon" - while a hanger-on reenacts Peter Sellers' role as Hrundi V. Bakshi in The Party.
Self's prose is soaring and dense with images. His plot turns keep the reader hanging on as stories careen in unforeseen directions, and his insights are pointed and delivered with a snap that stings even after he has moved to the next paragraph. With writing this good, it's almost impossible not to like Liver.

Will Self's story cycle "Liver" is definitely anything but a celebration of such a crucially important component of the body. Rather, his surface anatomy of four lobes is a dissection of the extent to which the organ is neglected, abused and in a permanent state of decay. Nay, Liver is not necessarily about the liver at all, but instead a survey of the bilious, fetid human condition; the organ itself is the link that connects the lobules of each character into one stinking gestalt of unpleasantness that, Self stresses, is born completely voluntarily.

Excruciating detail is the rule for this story cycle. The epicenter concerns particular emphasis upon the Plantation Club, a highly distinguished fellowship devoted to the gavage of willfully force-drinking their on-coming death. Secondly, the sojourn of a cold, cancerous woman to Switzerland and her assisted deathbed, though ever unsure whether she will be cured either of her ailment or pestilential daughter. Third, a revisit to the tale of Prometheus, where his daily grind as a highly ambitious advertising agent necessitates the acceptance of a large bird of prey. Though not to be outperformed, finally, by the surprisingly cogent narration of unlikeliest protagonists, observing and deliberating upon an evening soiree of intermingling junkies.

Self doesn't as much tell stories as he unleashes a highly colorful stream of consciousness, or unconsciousness if you prefer, among his characters and setting, which predominantly consists of the alleys of unkempt London. His rich vocabulary is a gavage unto itself, deliciously force-feeding the reader with "the chronic, the progressive, and the degenerative - a bit like civilization" as he will emphasize. Everyone experiences their own personal sepsis in this work, as Self most intellectually spares no expense describing all manner of bodily fluids and open sores. The reader may take caution, however, as the author's immense vocabulary and wit make this a slow and sinuous digestion.

It takes some effort to read Will Self, whose expansive vocabulary and dense narrative style challenges readers to get through even a single page without reaching for the dictionary. "Liver" is in many ways a typical Self book, graced by irretrievably graceless characters bringing ruin to their already ruined lives. But what sets this book apart from some of his others is the way it incorporates the most serious of pathos (the story "Leberknodel") alongside pure farce (the story "Premoetheus"), while maintaining a credible link between them. I was introduced to Self many years ago through the books "My Idea of Fun" and "Great Apes", which despite their complex and cerebral constructions still felt like extended jokes to me. Then I read "How The Dead Live," and felt wholly unprepared for the drama and poignancy Self was so clearly capable of producing. "Liver" is a collection of four stories nominally connected to one another, each allowing Self to present a different side of his sneeringly omniscient narrator's perspective, and what impressed me most was the apparent ease with which he could switch from dark comedy to dark drama. I particularly enjoyed the first two stories in the collection. "Foie Humain" may be a veiled commentary on the innate cruelty of humankind, but it works as an ensemble character study, a dynamic damning of group dynamics. Followed by the previously mentioned "Leberknodel", whose tone, style and subject matter are so completely different, the book could have stopped there and still have been a potent literary accomplishment. Although the third and fourth stories are not as compelling as the first two (to me, at least), they are perhaps perfect complements in that they allow for a gradual winding down from the book's preceding intensity. It isn't that they are bad -- there isn't a sour note in the whole book -- but they don't feel as complete as the first two stories, nor as integrated in the larger body of work here. Nonetheless, I was sorry when the book came to an end.