The Barnes & Noble Review
Long before they had mutated into those digital, immoderately powerful, GPS-fueled tracking devices that we all carry around in our back pocket, the telephone possessed a remarkable power to limn our hopes and fears. In the realm of cinema alone there was Hitchcock's '50s horror classic Dial M for Murder, the early-'70s phone-surveillance thriller The Conversation, and the '90s Scream franchise, not to mention all of the bizarre phone calls in David Lynch's films, and also The Matrix, which turns it into a conduit between competing human realities. In the literary realm we might briefly recall Philip K. Dick's famous line -- "There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me' " -- which now seems to have eerily foreshadowed the bouts of phone hysteria we regularly experience whenever there's a new story about mass government surveillance, Russian hackers, or the unsettling experience of your phone showing you an ad for a product you were just talking about with your friend.
So it's hardly a surprise that the British author Will Self, whose work has long displayed its affiliation with such giants of techno- modernism as J. G. Ballard, William Burroughs, and Franz Kafka, would get around to tackling this ubiquitous element of post-industrial technology. This novel, simply titled Phone, is the much-heralded conclusion to his so-called neo-modernist trilogy, following 2012's Umbrella and 2014's Shark.
This 600-page, single-paragraph stream-of-ranting begins with some of this reviewer's favorite writing of the entire novel, a dozen pages of impressionistic, only fleetingly connected phrasal riffs, each separated by a mysterious " . . . . !" It later becomes evident that this is, apparently, the mind of Self's recurring character Zachary Busner in the midst of an Alzheimer's-inflicted episode of senility. When Busner comes to, we (and he) realize that he wears only a blazer and has his genitals laid out on the buffet of a swank hotel. As security begins its inevitable task of apprehending and escorting him off the premises, Self does a rather beautiful job of sketching in the details of precisely who Busner is, how he came to be here, and where he's headed next.
Busner, we learn, is the aging patriarch of a sprawling family, as well as a wealthy, if somewhat eccentric innovator in the field of psychiatry (a role that Self has explored in several of Busner's prior appearances in his work). This early stretch features some of Phone's most affecting and penetrating writing: Busner's dismay and embarrassment as he discovers what Alzheimer's has made of him (for starters, he and the security men discover that his hotel room is smeared with his own feces); Busner's loneliness amid his bickering family, who have long since grown disconnected from and impatient with their odd and increasingly disruptive patriarch; and his own fears about his impending mortality and doubts about what he has done with his life.
It's all rather rich and full of potential, but then, out of nowhere and without even so much as a paragraph break, we are rocketed into a parallel life -- that of the aptly named Jonathan De'Ath, a.k.a. the Butcher, a closeted British MI6 agent who, among other strange affectations, endearingly carries on a running conversation with his lisping penis, whom he's named Squilly. When we catch up with him, the Butcher is setting out to quarry a gorgeous, somewhat naïve member of the armed forces, ostensibly straight but in whom the Butcher senses a definite kink. Self rather gleefully narrates De'Ath's militarily precise, boa constrictor–tight operation.
At this point the Butcher and his new lover, the somewhat excessively named Gawain, become Phone's core, as Self opens up their world while exploring their passionate, and completely secret, relationship. De'Ath is an entertaining, if absurdly macho and generally juvenile mind to hang around with, and through his involvement in every government conspiracy this side of Margaret Thatcher, Self takes the opportunity to traipse through many of the signal events of post-1989 world history. De'Ath's back-story -- involving his homophobic parents and the challenges of being closeted while pursuing a military and espionage career-- is intriguing enough, but it lacks the urgency and emotional depth of Busner's story.
Worse, it never feels as though the Butcher is going anywhere. Although Self grants De'Ath an almost unbelievably privileged position (at one point Tony Blair makes a cameo and sucks up to the Butcher about his tailored shirt), his thoughts about society are generally uninteresting. In essence, anyone who isn't as brilliant and as macho as he is gets dismissed as a "sheeple," and his reflections on ethics and morality tend to manifest around briefly celebrating his lost innocence, before thanking God that he's eliminated his sentimental attachment to the perfectibility of man. But perhaps the biggest disappointment is Self's failure to delve into the Butcher's much-bandied "data set" -- apparently the Butcher's genetically abnormal, encyclopedic, and drug-addled mind has the ability to crunch an impossibly immense array of sociopolitical information to divine secret truths about the world, but we never learn more about this remarkable capacity or its implications.
All throughout the escapades of Busner and De'Ath, Self shows a thoroughly modernistic lack of interest in developing his plot -- there are sizable chunks of back-story, and absolute deluges of raw information, but neither are caught up in anything close to a compelling narrative fix. Self does get some mileage out of the Butcher's guilty vacillations over coming out, and he draws some interesting parallels between the clandestine lives of spies and those of closeted gay men, but it never feels like very much to hang your hat on, certainly not enough to propel one through hundreds of densely packed pages.
And then there's Camilla, who feels a little bit like an afterthought that somebody forced Self to toss in. Daughter-in-law to Busner, mother of an autistic son, wife to a schizophrenic husband, she's the book's only real female presence. It must be said that rarely is absolute human misery so completely evoked in a work of fiction as it is during Camilla's brief appearance in Phone. That's no small achievement, but it also relegates Camilla to stoically enduring everything from her child's stony distance to condescending doctors to menstrual cramps. One can't help but notice the short shrift and relative lack of agency that Self grants her, particularly when Busner and the Butcher merrily go about their maximalist masculine mischief with such enviable freedom.
A lack of plot need not be an impediment to the success of a novel -- see Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, Bernhard, etc., etc. -- but something has to develop over the course of a work, or else one has stasis, and this is an issue with Phone. As the images and quips pile up, one is alternatively wowed by the author's linguistic virtuosity and increasingly desperate for something in this cathedral of cleverness to spring into life. At length, the feeling of being inside of this book comes to resemble being forced to listen to one gargantuan hip-hop freestyle: the sheer tonnage of puns, coinages, one-liners, jargon, and alliteration is undeniably impressive -- and for a while entertaining -- but eventually one succumbs to dullness: the rhythms never change, the tone is ever posted at a fever pitch, and it more and more feels that less and less is at stake.
This stylistic excess would be more forgivable if Phone didn't feel like a novel fruitlessly in search of ideas. Everything from the last quarter century that you could ever want is here, from the second Iraq war and the Balkan conflagration to autism (cue references to the MMR vaccine hysteria), terrorism, the evolution of queer culture, the rise of the Internet, and, of course, the massive revolution in telecommunications. All of these things, plus about 100 more -- not to mention plenty of allusions to heroes of literary modernism -- are carefully woven into Self's furious flow of data. Self seems to be fascinated by the way that our increasingly technological civilization has granted outliers -- be they geniuses, drug junkies, suffers of autism, or just long-tail bloggers with bizarre theories about the world -- greater and greater inroads to society at large, but it all never collects into anything more than snapshots of various eras (which, for what it's worth, are quite gorgeously done). One reads through this novel titled Phone and littered with communication devices of every kind -- from humble tin cans tied with string to high- and low-tech spy devices to the newest, most powerful iPhone -- without coming away with anything close to a new way of seeing the glowing tablets we're now trying not to be addicted to, or the web of connections that gives them their increasing power.
Phone is an energetic, stylistically gifted ride that offers a lot of fun and erudition -- probably for many readers that will be enough. Phone presents a thoroughly domesticated, tamed version of modernism, akin to some enormous, armor-plated rhinoceros that's been so subdued by the forces of civilization that you can walk right up to it and hop on its back. Taming such a creature might well be admired as a feat: but it leaves us wanting a confrontation with something wilder.
Scott Esposito is a critic, writer, and editor whose work has appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. In 2004 he created the widely praised literary website Conversational Reading, which can be found at http://conversationalreading.com.
Reviewer: Scott Esposito
From the Publisher
Praise for Phone:
Shortlisted for the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize
Seattle Pi Fiction to Watch for in 2018
“The British author Will Self may not be the last modernist at work but at the moment he’s the most fascinating of the tradition’s torch bearers. Phone is the final volume in a trilogy that traces the arc of technology and consciousness across the last century. It’s also a thrilling narrative of great historical sweep.”—Christian Lorentzen, New York
“True to its title, this is not a quiet book. It’s insistent, untidy, and enormously personal . . . Even more so than its two predecessors, Phone is worth the struggle. The book is, in addition to all its stylistic pyrotechnics, a magnificent portrait of fragility, the best thing Will Self has ever written.”—Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly
“An energetic ride that offers a lot of fun and erudition.”—Barnes and Noble Review
“Self’s new novel, Phone, concludes this spellbinding experimental trilogy . . . A stunning polemic against modern communication.”—Run Spot Run
“The characters’ stories unfold in abruptly ever-changing settings and viewpoints . . . trending towards entropy until an evolving unification of situations brings everything finally, and satisfyingly, into focus. The final installment of Self’s trilogy is an invigorating and challenging union of politics, history, and literary finesse.”—Booklist (starred review)
“[D]rug-addled psychiatrist Zach Busner, a recurring character in Self’s fiction, is startlingly similar to Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom in his inability to process new forms of eroticism and spirituality as the stability of a world founded in modernist principles crumbles around him . . . The narrative reads and feels like an endless data stream, underscoring Self’s deliberate attempt to bury the reader in an avalanche of information. A sardonic end to Self’s modernist trilogy.”—Library Journal (starred review)
“[T]he hefty stream-of-consciousness conclusion to Self’s ambitious trilogy . . . Self’s densely cerebral prose leaps between narratives, disregarding linear storytelling and paragraph breaks in favor of extended musings that are often intelligent and periodically insightful.”—Publishers Weekly
“Self makes subtle nods to modernist classics such as Ulysses along the way, unironically making Zack a kind of Leopold Bloom, though in his anxieties and preoccupations he could be someone from the pages of Howard Jacobson. A multilayered, multivocal, and long-awaited pleasure for the Self-absorbed.”—Kirkus Reviews
“There are marvels in store . . . Self’s technique matches high seriousness with, at times, positively childish joking—which is quite in keeping with the dissonance and incongruity that he seeks to restore to his literary account of the psyche . . . Phone is a fervid associative swirl . . . But what’s oddest of all is that the core of this third part of his trilogy, overlaid as it is by the mass of his thematic preoccupations, is that most un-Selfian of things: a love story.”—Times Literary Supplement (UK)
“Self’s modernist trilogy concludes with typical panache and wit . . . Phone is the final instalment in what has shown itself to be one of the most ambitious and important literary projects of the 21st century . . . It’ll take you a couple of weeks to read all three novels properly. But I can’t think of a better way to spend your time. Self’s message is a perennially important one, brilliantly expressed: only connect.”—Guardian (UK)
“Will Self’s Phone will be one of the most significant literary works of our century . . . books that reflect and refract the hideousness of our times and that attempt to move the novel beyond the Robinson Crusoe paradigm of an Enlightened man and his singular thoughts. Over and above the intellectual sprezzatura of the work, there is, at its heart, an emotional core, a profound sense of grief.”—New Statesman (UK)
“Will Self’s brilliant new novel is an epic anti-tweet . . . the third part of a defiant, self-consciously modernist trilogy. . . staggeringly ambitious, frighteningly intelligent, ludicrous, and brilliant. . . 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.”—Daily Telegraph (UK)
“[Phone] delivers a hurricane of satire and suspense . . . A novel of grand ideas, powered by a ravenous curiosity about the role of the technological revolution in our private and public woes . . . For all his modernist manoeuvres, Self keeps to a fairly orthodox strategy. William S Burroughs, meet John le Carré.”—Financial Times (UK)
“Looks a forbidding read, but after a few pages it’s like slipping into a warm, fragrantly scented bath . . . Self’s modernist stream-of-consciousness style, a kaleidoscopic tour-de-force of cultural references and wordplay, becomes addictive and compelling. Not to be missed.”—Daily Mail (UK)
“[A] great trilogy . . . Eccentrically punctuated, with no paragraphs, [Phone] is a series of fast-paced, laugh-out-loud witty, disgusting and frequently well-observed scenes. [Self] has a sharp ear for dialogue, and woven in and out of the surreal narrative are some of the wisest reflections on the folly of war (in this case the Gulf War) that you are likely to read outside the pages of Tolstoy. In our depressingly middlebrow intellectual climate, it is refreshing that at least one novelist is raising the bar.”—London Evening Standard
“Self seems to have fixed his eyes once again on the far-distant horizon of literary immortality and raised himself to his full and proper height . . . [Self has] achieved the status of a true classic. He now writes books that no one else could possibly write and which everyone admires . . . Phone reads like a techno-thriller written by Virginia Woolf . . . Like a lot of great books—Ulysses, Moby-Dick—Phone was probably even more fun to write than it is to read . . . Enthralling and exasperating in equal measure, Self’s corpus resembles not the little figurines of English so-called literary fiction but the big flash foreign models—the Cocteaus, the Houellebecqs, the Célines, the absolute shockers . . . You’d have to be pretty bloody-minded and blinkered not to recognise that the books are radically funny raucous romps, understandable and enjoyable by just about anyone and everyone.”—Prospect Magazine (UK)
Praise for Shark:
“Like the work of the great high modernists from the 1920s, like Joyce, Woolf and Eliot, there is a kind of chaotic beauty in Self’s unrestricted writing . . . There is an amazing consistency to his tone and style; he holds the narrative firmly together at all times, however random and complicated the structure of the book may appear . . . An outstanding work of literature that seeks to question and explore the fundamental components of what constitutes “normal” and “abnormal” behavior in our society . . . Go read it now. You’ll be simultaneously entertained, mesmerized, intellectually stimulated, baffled—and laugh your ass off.”—NPR Books
“[Self’s] text is more ocean than land, a strange, fluid, weightless place where present and past, surface and depth constantly converge, where terrors, both literal and psychic, loom . . . It’s a throwback to modernism, a continuation of the experiments of his literary influences, especially James Joyce and J.G. Ballard . . . Fans of experimental fiction will likely devour the book and applaud Self for inventing a dark stream of consciousness all his own.”—Washington Post
“Self writes in a high-modernist, hallucinatory, stream-of-consciousness style, leaping between sentences, time periods, and perspectives. It can be difficult to hang on, but if, like the titular creature, you keep moving through the ‘verbal bouillabaisse,’ the reward is a strange, vivid book.”—New Yorker
“Willfully neglected history, man-made catastrophe, hubris—and, yes, Jaws—all circulate through Will Self’s latest novel, Shark, which is determined to stoke our collective memories of humanity at its worst . . . Reflects a respectable urge to capture the mental and social collapse Self sees as a legacy of the world wars . . . Self wants to grab our heads firmly, turn us toward the mushroom cloud, make us look at the bodies Claude claimed to see within it, and never flatter ourselves that our capacity for self-destruction is distant history or somebody else’s problem . . . One of [Self’s] most compassionate and earnest books.”—New York Times Book Review
“You will be tossed about in the roiling ocean of words that make up the stream-of-consciousness narrative Self favors . . . The riptide force of Self’s postmodern brilliance will suck you in . . . Shark is as trippy and fanciful as falling down a rabbit hole . . . Pushes me out of my comfort zone . . . Persistence pays off because Shark will stir up a reading frenzy.”—Chicago Tribune
“Intellectually dazzling . . . Shark confirms that Self is the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation, a writer whose formidable intellect is mercilessly targeted on the limits of the cerebral as a means of understanding. Yes, he makes you think, but he also insists that you feel.”—Guardian
“A portrait of madness and sanity in the 20th century, tracing the effects of the machine age as well as the information age on people’s stubbornly fallible psyche . . . Yet the apparently anarchic writing is moderated by careful plotting and sympathetic character development . . . For all his newfound seriousness of intent Self remains a superb comic writer . . . An intoxicating experience. Self’s powerful command of language animates the intense prose while his dry wit is given a freer rein than in Umbrella.”—Financial Times
“Self’s sentences move with sharky verve: a playful, allusive, associative flow that traces frantic minds connecting the dots between past and present, ideals and reality. . . . Shark will challenge and disturb, exasperate and entertain. Self’s prose demands real attention, but is never less than sharp, biting and incisive. Prepare to be eaten whole.”—Independent
“Shark has no time for pause and no space for blankness, churning up clumps of words and polyrhythmic phrases and sounds at a breakneck pace . . . [Shark is] an attempt to offer unfettered access to the minds of the book’s characters . . . Here is a hunk of modernism that poignantly, beautifully, and, it seems, genuinely render mental states of sanity and insanity while smudging the gradations in between.”—Full Stop
“A maddening, uncompromising, serious, self-indulgent, and beautiful work . . . Comes as close to capturing the frightening bad trip of modern life as any book in recent memory.”—Publishers Weekly (boxed review)
“A truly wonderful novel . . . The language feels urgent and necessary . . . It is an exciting, mesmerizing, wonderfully disturbing book. Go with it, and it’ll suck you under.”—Daily Telegraph
“Highly enjoyable, vividly, even profoundly imagined. Self is creating something rather grand.”—Sunday Times
“Breathtaking and dazzling. An exhilarating tour-de-force . . . immersing the reader in a trippy Odyssey.”—Daily Mail
“A journey of language, of character, of unsettling fragmented narratives, of tricks, twists and turns. Shark will latch on to you and pull you under if you’re not careful—and that’s a good thing.”—Lit Reactor
