Customer Reviews

My Idea of Fun

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

 

 

Unlike most of the below reviewers, I found this book to be quite engaging. I can't help but think them put off by the horrid nature of the tale. Call me childish and sick, but I liked this well written and quite fantastic story. An unabashed five stars. Also, what's the problem with big words? If you'd rather read at a tenth grade level then go ahead and stick with most any other contemporary writer. I think you'll find that Self's choice of an exotic word over a more mundane possibility often adds to the detailed desciptive quality of his writing. Note that no one has accused him of mis-using his large vocabulary.

This book is not a great work of literature, BTW, but not all books are supposed to be. Some are more for fun, and this one is just not everyone's idea of it apparently.

Disclaimer: I am a big Will Self fan. However, I am not liking his new novel (_How the Dead Live_) very much, so know that I can also be critical of his work.

My Idea of Fun is an early Will Self novel from the time when he was high on drugs and waved his satirical windmills with abandon against the whole gamut of self-enclosed humanistic metropolitan society.

Essentially, this novel is typical first novel territory - charting the development and maturity of a young man, Ian Wharton, from school, through university, the world of work, relationships and ultimately marriage. But this book is a little different in that Ian is a deeply disturbed individual who plummets the depths of the human psyche - at the start of the book, he announces he is about to go upstairs to disembowl his wife, pregnant with his child. Why? Well that's a complicated tale that requires some 300 pages to unravel. His mental strings have been played mercilessly throughout his life, first by the Churchillian The Fat Controller (definite article very important) who appears at vital junctures in Ian's life, such as when he is about to sleep with a woman, and ruckles the texture of his reality. Then there is the left field psychiatrist Dr Gyglle, who submits Ian to a terrifying series of mind calming experiments. No wonder Ian is messed up, as he pursues his marketing career - that ultimate 90s job, just as corporate law is for the upwardly mobile graduate in the 2000s - and tries to make sense of his self, that mysterious id, that lies within.

Overall, a scatalogical, shock novel that showcases Self's trademark style - each sentence with pistons grinding furiously to add value to the reading experience, words gyrating together like go-go dancers. It is a vigorous, entertaining style, that shakes up the grey area of London, the mundane office blocks and infrastructures in a toxic cocktail of verbiage. Overall the book is a little like some of the efforts of Martin Amis, one of Self's heroes - dazzling on the surface, but a little light underneath, which prevents it from being truly shocking, unlike some of his really sinister work like the Kafkaesque Cock and Bull stories, or 'Understanding the Ur-Bororo' or 'Grey Area' in his early short story collections.

Doubtless Will Self would refute this, but I remain convinced that he is a better short story writer and journalist than he is a novelist. And this effort, for all its high points and scintillating riffs, confirmed it.

My only prior experience with Will Self was through The Quantity Theory of Insanity, a collection of short stories that defiantly refused to be what I expected of them; whether that's really a good thing or not I have yet to decide, but sampling once his bizarre (and unhealthy) imagination let me know I had to have more, so I immediately picked up a used copy of this book when I saw it on sale.

My Idea of Fun starts off with a gripping opening, continues with a gripping and slightly baffling inner story, and then becomes, frankly, sickening -- but by the end one is so wrapped up in the story that one can't turn away as depravity after depravity comes to light. (I have only read one other book, Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory, that made me feel literally dirty after reading it. While reading this book, I almost choked on the meal I was eating when I came to the protagonist's second visit to the Land of Children's Jokes.) This is a disorienting story, and while I'm tempted to afford it some pat description -- ``a surrealistic romp'' -- that is inaccurate; it is precisely the contradiction between the realistic, drily factual tone in which Self records his story and the ludicrous content of that same story that makes reading it so disorienting.

However, to judge from literary critics, when writing about Will Self, the plot must come second -- no review is complete without the obligatory mention of the prodigious size of his vocabulary. My copy of this book was apparently previously owned by someone who intended using it as a dictionary, because most of the multisyllabic words (and there are a lot, with Self) are underlined. This made it hard not to notice his often remarkable choices of words, but, in the passages where the underliner had not penetrated, I found that the language flowed smoothly and easily (even when the content was unpalatable). Though I pride myself on my vocabulary, there were a number of words that defeated me, but Self tends to place such words in sufficient context there's no real difficulty in figuring their meaning.

The reviews on the back of my copy of the book (which looks different from the picture displayed here -- the front cover has a marvellous illustration of The Fat Controller (mind that capitalised article!) which made his occurrences in the book all the more sinister) declare, among other things, that there are ``more ideas per chapter'' in this novel than in any the reviewer had recently read, and, while there are certainly juicy musings to be had (chapter 8, I believe, opens with perhaps the best metaphorical description of time that I have ever read), this is by no means a novel of ideas. It is an engaging and disturbing story, but don't read it expecting to be enlightened -- just to be entertained, albeit capably and very intelligently.

Will Self's "My Idea of Fun" is on par with Nabokov's "Lolita", "The Tin Drum" by Gunter Grass, and "London Fields" by Martin Amis. These books may be disturbing, but they are equally poetic, astute and humorous. I'll never tire of them.

I've read this book in french (because I am), and I'm very surprised of the bad critics I read here, because in french it's just fabulous. Maybe the translator, Patrick Kerline, is a good writer, but I doubt he invents the style of the book instead of the author. It's a very well writed book, with a fantastic story which proves the fertility of Will Self'imagination, and maybe the best english writer I read for years (Amis is just now the shadow of himself, Kureishi too, I found Mc Liam Wilson recently, particulary with his "Ripley Boggle", but he's Irish). This book is my W.Self's favorite, because of its complexity, the richness of its characters and again its amazing style.

So many reviews of Self shrug him off as someone looking to just shock the reader and do nothing more. I think the reviews themselves are enough to prove that probably isn't the case. He wouldn't be doing all that great of a job if reviewers had to poke fun at his "gasp...shocking" passages in his books. I think instead Will Self succeeds because he takes concepts that may be outside of the norm and doesn't use them for pure shock value. He instead makes them common elements of the story. This book is a wonderful example of this, and many of the outrageous ideas that are purely there for jokes at points in How the Dead Live also show this. He may draw you in with a gimmick, but he doesn't just let it rest there. He adds so much more to it, and that is why (for me) his books succeed.

Hi. This book is more than just funny. It's mind-achingly intelligent and exciting. Is it the story of a crazed serial-killer? Is it the story of a fat man with a photographic memory and a good imagination? I can't tell you, and I've read the...book twice now. But just because everything isn't spelled out for you doesn't make this a book to read, to ponder, and to enjoy. A lot of people hat Will Self because he's a self-agrandizing middle class [addict]. Me, I love him for it. He's smart. He's addictive. He's weird. And his books make you jump out of your skin with delight.

Remember, reading Will Self makes you thirsty.

Ian Wharton is delusional. He believes he has extraordinary powers, and that a character from his childhood, The Fat Controller, has taken over his mind. Wharton aspires to nothing more than to lead a normal life, emotionally and sexually. The Fat Controller wants him to commit the most gruesome crimes. Indeed, he expects Wharton to murder his own pregnant wife. It can all be explained. Wharton's nemesis might be no more than an old family relation, an eccentric now safely packed away in a retirement home. But since the story is told from Wharton's point of view - and to make things worse, not always in the first person - there is no telling where reason merges into madness.

Will Self's portrayal of insanity is overwhelming. His style of writing is explosive. But the reader might as well be warned about a few things. First, madness is more boring than it sounds. Obsession is by definition repetitive, and My Idea Of Fun is too long in parts. Second, Will Self is either less good at, or not interested in, doing normality. Example, from an office scene: `There are no such things as strangers, only prospects we haven't converted, yet.' Business people don't talk like that, not informally. And does everyone have to be a sexually tormented freak? Perhaps the point is that there is no such thing as normality, that we are all insane to a degree. If so, it is made neither subtly nor convincingly. Third, the novel's ending is predictably cryptic, with at least three plausible interpretations. There is a point to this, of course, but some readers do like to have closure. This book is only fun if you're prepared to go a little cuckoo over it.

With the verbal explosiveness of T.C. Boyle and a hand for the grotesque not duplicated since Bret Easton Ellis' "American Psycho", Self carves out new territory with this first novel. Where it fails though, is in its inability to break through the limitations of its brilliant and horrific prose to engender the reader with any sense of morality or meaning.

What Ellis does so adeptly in "American Psycho", namely set a context to violence, Self all but disregards in his "cautionary tale". His attempts at portraying the evils of consumerism and capitalism fall well short of the mark. The reader gets the feeling that Self is so impressed by his own vocabulary and inventive prose that the story and its message have been all but forgotten.

It is obvious from the first few pages that the author knows (or believes) that he is far more intelligent than most of his readers. He appears to think that novel writing is beneath him, something that can be tossed off in a few weeks between his witty, sardonic tv performances. This novel is lazy, cold-hearted and dull, while only occasionally allowing clever Mr Self to show off his skilful use of language. It is hard to care what happens in a book where the main characters are unsympathetic and poorly sketched. Half way through the novel (on the busy 8.40 from Peckham Rye to Blackfriars), I was so bored that my mind wandered and I had an idea that I later put into practice with a big positive impact on my life....so thank you Will, you did me a favour. There is one particularly revollting scene where a dog is sexually abused, tortured and killed. As the previous book I'd read (I think it might have been by Irvine Welsh - a vastly superior novelist) had a very similar scene with a dog, it didn't even have shock value. I'm not a dog lover and I have no problem with violence or even sadism in literature, if it is well written, but there are far too many pets being mutilated in the name of British Literature!