If you have ever
wondered whether a book can hate you, Will Self’s Umbrella will bless you with a densely voiced, slightly illegible
but resounding yes. This novel hates you on every page, unconditionally and
with a passion. It hates your cute haircut and the soft expression in your
eyes. It hates the immature cuticles on your fingers. It hates the way you read,
the way you try to skip the thorniest passages and get to the meatiest parts –
those that would be ‘interesting’ or even ‘understandable’. Primarily, it hates
your guts. To the extent that the way with Umbrella
is to try and win its trust and maybe even affection – by tightly gripping the
book, by holding on and believing in that big, old-fashioned sacrifice for the
sake of art. Because this really is your only chance.
Take almost any
contemporary writer of note and a few Bookers (well, maybe of shortlisted fame
– like Mr. Self himself), and you will see that underneath all that ‘higher
voice’ and artistic integrity, there’s a great desire to be loved. It’s give or
take with ‘understood’, but to be liked is a must. The plots and the prose are there spreading their legs for you or at least smirking adorably for some kind of
love and enjoyment. With Will Self, there’s just no such thing. Here is a man
who simply doesn’t care. Which isn’t really so hard to do when you are a young
artist who is really more young than an artist. But when you are someone as
established as Will Self is, when you write 1000 published words every day
(this is according to a recent interview with the man), that’s a completely
different story. It means shortlisted is as far as you are ever going to get.
It means University and college courses will faithfully snub your works. It
means people will either love or hate you.
It’s more like love for
me, but by no means has it been a perfect record. While I consider myself a huge
fan of Will Self’s writing (and that includes his fiction as well as his
journalism), I do admit that The Book Of
Dave is there lying somewhere eyeing me with disdain. I still believe that
novel needs a rope, a gun and a machete. Well, perhaps one day.
This time, however, I
was quickly and ruthlessly won over by the single and singular metaphor that so
expertly and so poetically ties the whole book together. First you read it as
the novel’s title on the cover or elsewhere. Then you have a passing crush on
it when you see it in the epigraph. (James Joyce’s timeless quote: “A brother
is as easily forgotten as an umbrella”.) Then you see it under various guises throughout
the book: it could be a syringe and it could be a penis. It could be many
things, and if you are more intrigued than enlightened, that’s not such a bad
thing either.
And then there’s of
course the actual novel. It’s never too easy, is it, and I can still hear my
mind noisily resisting the humourlessly lush prose huge on words (in all their endless manifestations), lacking in paragraphs and
threaded with merciless cursives that on occasion appear so sudden and so
random. Except they aren’t, so do try to hang on to these three interwoven
narratives, time periods and characters. The 1918 story of Audrey Death, a
munitions worker and a feminist, who falls victim to a severe epidemic of
encephalitis lethargica, can so easily ooze into an interior monologue of Dr.
Zack Busner, a retired psychiatrist who in 2010 looks back on his work (namely
1971) in Friern Mental Hospital where a strong drug helped him awake his
post-encephalitic patients – including Audrey Death. It’s one hell of a read,
one that is fascinating rather than engaging. It’s a bit like David Lynch’s Inland Empire without any visual aids or
depictions of immaculate female breasts to help you weather the storm. You don’t
see anything but the language – but the language is good. Illegible not by
accident but by design, Will Self’s writing is a congested jungle of words that
barely give you a chance to let a page slip by, take a break or even breathe.
Still, as long as you can run into jewel observations like “old age is a form
of institulisation” or “it’s a matter of time – how you understand time”, you
should be doing okay. It’s basically your stamina, your attention, your
intuition and your love of art. Speaking of which, Umbrella is so offensively, so deliberately pretentious that it slaps
you with that word (a-r-t) as tirelessly and consistently as a gloved hand of
an erudite boxer.
However, it would be a
sign of bad taste to decry pretentiousness in such a daring novel.
Interestingly, excluding a boy with an iPad and a few other details, Umbrella could have been written back in
the 1920s by an especially snotty and edgy Modernist inspired by nothing else
but determination and self-belief. Which means, I guess, that Will Self
achieved whatever he had set out to achieve. I mean, how many writers these
days are prepared to go this far? Martin Amis tried and failed with Yellow Dog. Kazuo Ishiguro did well with
a much more modest The Unconsoled.
But it’s Will Self that had the guts to take the top prize. Even if,
technically, he was stalled at the shortlist stage.
Maybe it’s way too easy
forget these days that art can, and
perhaps should, be challenging. Hell, even difficult. Will Self himself has
admitted that it’s a difficult book. One, however, I will give any number of
literary awards to (not that he will need them). And before I sign off and urge
you to read the damned thing, as insistently as I only could, I would like to
stress yet again that this novel is not
entertainment. Nor needs to be. But do believe me: bruised and beaten, you will
somehow find solace in that.
9/10
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