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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Many Deft Touches,
By robert konrath (new orleans) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (Hardcover)
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.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Better without the gimmicks,
By
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This review is from: Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (Will Self) (Paperback)
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."
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful contemporary fiction with few weaknesses,
By Sirin (London, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (Will Self) (Paperback)
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.
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