Book Review: Psycho Too

Psycho Too, by Will Self. Photo / Supplied

Will Self is a real writer. By this, I mean not just that he troubles himself to excite words out of their least-energy states. I mean that he has an achieved style which works his personality and his thoughts right into the warp and weft of his language. This means, of course, that if you happen to hate his personality and his thoughts, you will hate his language as well.

Some would argue that I am making a false distinction here: all we ever have of writers are their words on the page, and the notion that you can separate out a personality from the language and say the one expresses the other is a romantic delusion. Self is a profoundly anti-romantic writer, which is to say that he's a romantic with his back turned and his buttocks bared, so naturally he begs to differ.

In the long essay which serves as an introduction to this latest collection of his newspaper opinion columns, he talks about his relationship with one of his great heroes, J.G. Ballard. He interviewed Ballard as a young writer, and was overjoyed to discover that Ballard had not only read some of his fiction, but approved of it. Would Ballard, he asked timidly, like to meet again some time?

"No, he said, he didn't go out much ... moreover, writers knowing each other in the flesh was almost entirely beside the point: the true communion existed in the texts, and we had that with each other already. It was true. There could be no greater meeting of minds than the one we had already experienced ... a far more mutual relationship than any I had ever contracted for through the mere accident of propinquity".

Handily, this paragraph at once backs up my notion that it's possible to learn a lot about Self from his prose style, and gives a hint of why I thoroughly dislike him. But perhaps "a far more mutual relationship than any I had ever contracted for through the mere accident of propinquity" doesn't strike you as an overburdened exercise in pomposity? Fine. Try this: musing on the importance of Ballard to his development, Self recalls a driving expedition with an early girlfriend, inspired by Ballard's novel Crash: "The necrotic flesh of plastic bags flapped on barbed wire fences, crows descended on the corpse of a muddy field, seagulls followed the plough, pylons engaged in a tug of war with high-tension cables ... I stopped the car, and - terribly aroused - made my slimy moves. On the way back to London we bought a cheese and pickle sandwich at a petrol station and as we shared it the yellow-white gratings dropped into our laps like the shredded skin of H-Bomb victims. I had her stained underwear in the pocket of my jacket".

The eroticisation of the grimy, the use of imagery too eager to offend to be offensive, the covertly self-valorising exposition of one's own youthful crassness ... this is the world Self wants to share with us, and does, in every one of the reprinted Independent columns which fill out the bulk of this bulky book. They traverse a wide range of topics, but there's nothing more to learn from them once you've grasped his modus operandi, which is to find the necrotic flesh in the plastic bag and the stained underwear in the pocket. It has to be said he gets his so-toxic-it's-sexy view of things on to the page with an admirable efficiency. But my chief response to his writing is an overpowering desire to yawn.

* Psycho Too, by Will Self, Bloomsbury $59.99.

David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.