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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Filthy London life,
By Sirin (London, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Liver (Hardcover)
4 stories all on a liverish theme in this collection. Will Self has for a while now served up stories that portray our consciousness as a ragged, fleeting entity. Human beings, especially those living in urban connurbations are merely bags of desires, needing instant gratification. Qualities such as beauty, care, love, commitment and meaning has exited stage left long ago.
3 of the stories focus on the familiar Selfland of media London. 'Foie Humain' is set in the Plantation Club (a roman a clef on the notorious Colony room, now shut down) whose denizens perpetuate a filthy gavage like the geese farmers of the Dordogne on their hapless barman. Prometheus is a modern retelling of the Prometheus myth set in the glib, drug fuelled London advertising scene. Prometheus is a wildly successful copywriter, who can breathe fire into the most sodden of products, but he is chained to the porcelain rock of his toilet while a vulture feeds on his liver every day, followed by regeneration. A nice trope to define much of modern London media life. Drugs also feature in the final story, Birdy Num Num, told from the viewpoint of the hepatitis C virus, another interesting exercise in Self probing new fictional angles but the result is like some of his earlier fictional ideas from his drug phase - an interesting conceit that is underworked in the execution. Leberknodel (Liver Dumplings) is the exception to this grubby London media scene: a novella length story that treads the less worn fictional terrain of Zurich. Joyce is a retired hospital administrator with cancer who travels to Switzerland with her alcoholic wastrel daughter. Regretting her lack of appreciation of the small trivial things in life, Joyce turns down the lethal dose, and miraculously finds that her cancer has gone into remission. Now - in the cockpit of Swiss orderliness - she has plenty of time to appreciate the mundane, but at what price? Self is a witty and acerbic satirist, who can draw out mot justes and acid turns of phrase from his quiver as fleetingly at Robin Hood drew arrows. Writing comes easily to him. But beneath the surface of the thousands of words he hammers out each year, you can sense his deep disappointment with humanity. Like all the best satirists, Self is a moralist who believes people are capable of better. The most revealing passages in Liver are not the verbose deconstructions of London topography - 'the sphincter of the Old Street roundabout', nor its ghastly inhabitants, but the odd peans to beauty and humanity - a red admiral butterfly, the thought of a reformed prisoner teaching children with learning difficulties. Selfland is a murky place, and Will Self bravely eschews sophisticated literary London for the harsh but more realistic job of forcing his nose up against life's many smelly vices and uglinesses. But he has also become a self confessed walking addict in recent years, and his perambulations enable him to escape the filth of trendy London, and appreciate a human existence that can be more elevated, even if only fleetingly.
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