Customer Reviews

Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (Will Self)

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

 

 

The story, "Flytopia" is the standout entry in this collection. It's a wonderful miniature -- proportioned exquisitely, rhetorically balanced, a near-perfect short story. And yup, Self shares talents with Nicholson Baker: they both render griping dark fantasies, have a fine sense for physical detail, and fret over style. Baker writes more mechanically precise and tighter prose. Self has a darker outlook and uses a bit heavier, richer vocabulary (in part, because he throws British slang into the mix.)

With the exception of a fatuous, painfully wiredrawn story about a German-speaking British baby ("A Story for Europe"), the tales in this anthology are very good. About half the book is taken up with a story and a novella that both concern the same two black British brothers. In these, you'll learn tons more than you need (or want) about crack smoking and British jails, but you'll love the characters and their predicaments. Self's stories and characters are not slick or especially predictable and that adds to their charm.

Will Self borrows a gimmick used by Kafka, Borges, and in one not-very-succesful story by Fitzgerald (A Diamond as Big as the Ritz) and, to some extent, used in all science fiction. An impossible or supernatural event is treated naturalistically, or accepted deadpan without comment by the characters.(Isaac Asimov Magazine stories do this well).
Another trademark, reminiscent of the dirty Scottish shock-writers, is descriptions of drug and alcohol use from the point of view of the user. He also favors effects that used to be called Grand Guignol and are now called splatterpunk.
These devices are used as the hinges of his plots and the entertainment values of his stories often depends on how compelling you find them. Apart from them he is a witty and perceptive satirist with some wonderful prose such as his description of the small Suffolk town "landlocked by the shifting dunes of social trends" where "the landlords of the three desultory pubs on the main street drew pints for themselves in the cool, brown, afternoon interiors of their establishments."

Will Self described a book by Bret Easton Ellis (The Informers) as '(taking) us from the first to the seventh circles of hell, from Salinger to De Sade'. This collection is more character based and plot driven than his previous collections - the Quantity Theory of Insanity and Grey Area. In the final story, a prison creative writing instructor urges the inmate scribblers that stories must have 'a beginning, a middle and an end', and Self seems to have taken his own fictional character's instruction on board to reign in some of his earlier, wilder metafictional techniques. Still, he remains true to his long term fictional project: to skewer the hypocrisies, the shibboleths and the complacency of Millenial capitalism and society with powerful, disturbing imagery.

The range is impressive. Self scans the top and bottom of society - with everything in between. The collection is bookended by two drug stories: 'The rock of crack as big as the Ritz', parodying the famous Fitzgerald story, where two black Londoners find their Harlesden house is underpinned by a gigantic rock of crack which they sell to wealthy Iranian bankers, and 'The Nonce Prize'in which one of the brothers, Danny, is framed for a horrific paedophile murder and takes to creative writing amongst sex offenders in prison. These two stories cover classic Self themes: the high and low life of London society, and the desire to throw a brick through the stately Edwardian rectory window of much contemporary fiction (would Beryl Bainbridge write about a paedophile murder? I doubt it). In between are a variety of stories that cover the grizzly terrain of modern life, featuring Self's trademark Swiftian ideas of scale, and psychological strangeness:

In 'Design Faults in the Volvo 760', Bill Bywater, a London psychiatrist has to face up to his anxieties at being an urban adulterer, feeling himself a giant King Kong-esque monster straddling the Westway flyover with Serena, his mistress, tiny in his hand. Bill is reprised in the magnificent title story - an escape from Self's usual fictonal terrain of raddled urban London - as he drives south through the rain spattered Scottish landscape from his Orkney Islands bolt hole with a benefit scrounging, hopeless case, hitchiker who forces Bill to face fully the masculine authority of his vocation and hedonistic lifestyle and examine the hollow centre within.

In 'Flytopia' a lonely indexer in a boiling hot cottage in a desultory East Anglian village finds himself entering into a strange symbiosis with the insects in his house, who end up helping him out with a spot of bother with his wife.

'Caring Sharing' - one of the less effective stories in the collection as it is merely the unravelling of a basic conceit, is a cyberpunk style tale of spoilt Manhattanites: 'These types were always on the verge of exhibiting, publishing, constructing, filming or presenting something, but never actually managed it.' - who transfer their infantile emotional needs onto giant emotos, who end up pursuing their own furtive sex lifes, while the adults aren't looking.

'Dave Too' deals with the problem of nomenclature - how to function in a world where everyone is called Dave. This again highlights one of Self's weaknesses - his tendency to pursue a conceit at the expense of character, though the psychiatrist, Dr Klagfarten, is a classic Self depiction - a wierdo, at the forefront of human neuroses, in his surrealist officee: 'If a fork like prop for a Magritte painting were to be plunged through the window of Dr Klagfarten's office, a gush of yellow neurosis would undoubtedly ooze out'.

'A Story for Europe' is a topical tour de force. Written at the time when all Euro-zone national financial arrangements were converging to prepare for the Euro single currency, it tells two parallel tales: in a liberal London home, Humpy the baby begins to say his first words: 'Wir mussen expandieren!' - simultaneously, over in the glass and steel financial district of Frankfurt, a respectable German financier is losing his marbles. The ending is predictable, as is the point made, but the story is great fun.

Will Self's fiction is not for everyone. He is a comic satirist of the most pungent form - Swift, Mencken, Bill Hicks, Self is in that tradition. As the publisher's note on the dust jacket says: A nasty, heartless compendium of the muddy foreshore and the abysmal depths of the human psyche. Order your diving bell now.

Well, this book is .... worth reading. These short stories are brilliant. Not all of them. I think it depends on ones taste about which of them are worth or not but there is at least ONE story that can make you loose your breath, or at least make you think about losing it.. The self titled story is amazingly tough sensitive and unique, no writer ever experiments with matters like these (some would say because they are trivial matters perhaps).He writes about derranged situations, but with perfect realism. He is a unique writer. He is probably one of the sharpest minds alive but still..... this book may not be good enough for you. No conservative thought is allowed in the world of Will Self and some of the readers are probably going to hate him for exposing their taboos... The manual about the VOLVO car is the best short story i have ever read. It will be cult after some decades until then only few people will have the privilege to read Will Self and enjoy.The majority will be talking about a lunatic who wanted to be writer or just a boring show off guy. We love him anyway...

The whole book seemed less dense than The Quantity Theory of Insanity, for example, or maybe I just don't get it because I've never done crack.

Still, I finished this one before the others on my night stand. Maybe his stories would be deeper if Self found a character or two to like.

The expectancy of starting a book was amplified with Will Self's TTTFTTB, because I had read so many raves about his brilliance as a writer, and with the first story, "A Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz" I was not disappointed. Self's ear for British underclass patois is superb -- better than Tom Wolfe-- (at least to someone who's never actually heard it spoken). And of course, it's always entertaining to read subjective descriptions of alcohol and/or drug excess.

But then, the remainder of the stories in this collection is wildly uneven. "Flytopia" is o.k., but it reads like a story that could be found in a pulp magazine such as the "Twilight Zone" series (if it's yet published). I began to harbor doubts about his writing at "a freezer full of eugenic vegetables." (p.26) Is that an adroit neologism or simply bad English? So with the description of the flies doing a "buzzing pavane" under the lights. Self seems to prefer an obscure or technical term where a simple and familiar word would do. Is this because his technique is on such an advanced plane? When I turned the page to see "They were comprised of many many thousands . . ." my doubts heightened.

"A Story for Europe" is all style and no substance, and the title story, TTTFTTB, could have been written by anyone. It is entirely predictable to the end, because as soon as we are told that the selfish protagonist climbs into his big powerful car with leather seats, we are led to dislike him as much as a Martin Amis character. Utterly one-dimensional.

Self later tries to duplicate the success of the opening story with the longest piece of the collection, "The Nonce Prize," and at first we're again intoxicated with the louche adventures of the drug dealers. But about halfway through the novella, Self seems to lose steam, and the clever dialogue gradually disappears, leaving only narrative and description. The situations become unlikely and then boring and pointless.

There's no doubt that Will Self is among the most brilliant of authors, but if only he wrote better stories.

Worth getting for the title story and The Nonce Prize. The rest can be disregarded. The title story is the best short story I've read: totally engaging and wonderfully disturbing and sensual in it's own unique way. The Nonce Prize is also classic, revelling in the prison-world/writer's- world of it's main protagonist and the word nonce, and not necessarily in that order. These 2 stories are so tasty and fulfilling, particularly the title story, that the 5 stars is not given lightly even though the rest of the offering seems to be mere filler.

A Rock of Crack As Big As The Ritz, now there's social realism. Journalism may make you feel sorry for people, but Will Self makes you understand people. You understand their pain, their reasons, there failings, and their successes. The other stories in this collection are almost just as perfect as the first one. Read them all. Read them to your children.

A lot of people don't like Will Self, but a lot of people like smoking cigarettes. A lot of people are stupid.

Remember, reading Will Self makes you illustrious.