Will Self’s new novel unspools over 600 pages without a single paragraph break, remorseless in its commitment to its own difficulty. It is a confrontational novel, making no concession to the abbreviated attention span of those who spend their millennial lives glued to the titular device. What better riposte to a culture that thinks in fewer than 140 characters? Phone, his 12th novel, follows Umbrella (2012) and Shark (2014), the third part of a defiant, self-consciously modernist trilogy.
Much of Phone is set in the Nineties but throws forward to the Noughties and the war in Iraq. It flits between perspectives of different characters to explore the way technology — violently, traumatically — shapes our lives. It is staggeringly ambitious, frighteningly intelligent, ludicrous and brilliant. In many ways, the setting of this novel is a return for Self: it was in the Nineties, after all, that he acquired his rep as the most terrible of a new generation of literary enfants.
At 55, Self has become, in his own words, “a grotty middle-aged man” and suffers a certain kind of celebrity. He has also put out a formidable amount of journalism. He might not like to be called a public intellectual, but he’s desperate to be a public provocateur. One of his recent provocations has been to declare the imminent death of the serious novel, a result, he argues, of the way digital technology and the internet are changing the way we read.
There is a degree to which Self revels in being the advocate of doom, discordantly tooting on his kazoo while the rest of the band plays on, but he does have some pretty damning statistics on his side. Still, if he’s going down, he’s not going down without a fight. Phone is a novel that takes its seriousness seriously.
To the elite cadre of Self’s readers, Phone’s challenges are old news. Umbrella and Shark, too, eschewed paragraphs and other such bourgeois conventions of the codex. (Like Finnegans Wake, that overbearing ancestor of difficult fiction, Shark even began and ended in mid-sentence.) At the level of the sentence, this is prose that refuses the consolations of the realist mode: narrative unfolds in the continuous present and is characterised by ellipses like this... followed by italics, for emphasis or quotation, or just as a form of free indirect speech.
Here, from an earlier part of the book, is Zack Busner, septuagenarian experimental psychiatrist and embattled paterfamilias, remembering a failed encounter with a prostitute in his hotel room the previous night: But after a little dabbling they’d broken. Yer ‘eart’s not really innit, is it, love? She curled back into the chair’s concavity, smoothing her skirts, while he’d sat back on his heels, watching the old man, with wild white hair sprouting from his scalp, sitting back on his heels, his belly bulging as he’d squatted out there, five storeys up... in the glassy darkness. He’d heard then — hears again now — the rasp of a saxophone, the circus-top jiggy-jiggy of a hack band. He’d seen then — sees again now — the unfunny little man’s festination as he chases after the scantily-clad dollybirds... King Leer! But with no kingdom any longer to rule over with his surreally melting sceptre.
There is much that marks this as classically Selfian: the phonetic rendering of dialect, the Leer/Lear pun, and, with the deployment of “festination”, the kind of vocabulary the disemboguing of which has seen some accuse him of being nothing more than... a sesquipedalian onanist. But there is much more going on, too. As Busner sees his reflection float outside the hotel window he understands his predicament first as comic (the Benny Hill saxophone) then as tragic (King Lear). And that “glassy darkness” is quite something. The unreliable Busner has been a fixture of Self’s fiction since his first collection of short stories, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, but in the opening pages of this novel we see him as we have not before. He has been found at a Hilton breakfast buffet in central Manchester and he can’t remember his name or his room number. His smartphone keeps ringing — “NO CALLER ID” — but he does not answer, baffled by his “five-hundred quid worry bead”. Who is calling the good doctor?
Just as this strand of narrative gets going, it shifts abruptly and mid-sentence to another Manchester hotel room, 20 years earlier, in which Jonathan “The Butcher” De’Ath, a suave, manipulative MI6 operative is limbering up. De’Ath drugs and seduces Gawain Thomas, and the two begin a clandestine affair. Keeping their story secret in a world of eroding privacy is the meat of the novel. Which, in a strange kind of way, makes this novel a love story. Story is, though, secondary to style in Phone. And what a style, fired as it is by an antic relentlessness: there is the deliberate disorientation of the reader, the relish in puerility, the ventriloquism, the black humour more witty than funny.
As author, Self is in total control; and the reader-victim is left with a form of Stockholm syndrome. Reading the hundreds of unbroken pages of Phone demands a physical commitment, the literary equivalent of mountaineering. But after all that, the summit brings a kind of elation. Sure, that elation is partly about knowing that the hard scrabble is over. Sure, it is partly also down to the smug knowledge that so few others will climb this peak.
–The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2017
