A Lively Evening with Will Self
Having written dozens of books and collections of stories, Will Self is perhaps best described as a novelist and a poet. When he’s in the mood the former enfant terrible of UK literary fiction hosts events at unusual venues, reading his latest works which are lengthy and always go the extra mile. One of his latest gigs, in between a slew of mainstream TV appearances, took the distance thing literally. The venue was the Free Church in Hampstead Garden Suburb, a part of North London with a distinctly rustic feel. Although only about half a mile from the main Finchley Road between Golders Green and the North Circular Road, it could have been a country cottage set borrowed from Midsomer Murders. As it happens there had been several anti-Semitic attacks in the area that very week, adding another layer of edginess to an already unpredictable evening.
Semitic roots
The son of a Jewish father, there was no way politics wouldn’t feature in his talk. In fact, the author describes his new book, The Quantity Theory of Morality as “an elegy for anti-Semitism in North London” where he was brought up. Some of the main characters are Jewish although Self is at pains to point out that he is not addressing a cultural view:
“Maybe the local community is a privileged minority but racism is racism and the young must realise this. The loathsome chanting of ‘Death to the IDF’ at Glastonbury was not the answer but maybe a single state solution is, with no element of religion. Real Jews are Ashkenazis (from Russia, Poland and other parts of Northern Europe). Israel, formerly Palestine, happens to be where the various tribes were born, hence the historic internal feuds in the area often provoked by the Ottoman Empire.”
One could compare the situation with what’s currently going on with Iran and its terrorist proxies but despite the large percentage of Jewish fans in the well-attended church, nobody seems to have either expected or had an appetite for a political debate. The same applies to Self who effortlessly steered his lecture towards the underlying themes of the novel – mental illness, the curse of technology, ethics, the parlous state of literature and the apparent disappearance of discretion, all served with prodigious amounts of satire.
A satirical world
“We live in a satirical world,” he observes. “People used to say ‘you are what you eat’ but most people today seemed to be eating fast food from Deliveroo because they can’t be bothered to cook from scratch. No wonder cancer rates are so high,” Will adds having recently recovered from a rare form of the disease which required risky stem-cell surgery. “In fact, I would say healthcare has supplanted religion.”
This was one of many witty one-liners which coloured Self’s loquacious yet concise pre-amble to his reading. It is a critical, aggressive tome, more than 350 pages in length, opening with the warning ‘The Bishop is out for blood, not tea’. Like much of his other work it has a natural flow and articulacy while the humour ranges from sheer spontaneity to drop-dead moments sparking gasps of ‘I can’t believe he just said that’.
The plot itself hangs around a group of middle-aged friends whose hedonistic, bourgeois lives revolve around lengthy, over-catered lunch parties and expensive villa holidays in exclusive parts of Europe undiscovered by the common herd. The satire comes with not only the inevitable wife-swapping but also the taken-for-granted gender transitioning, Self as narrator occupying a couple of roles. He shows little gratitude for the champagne-fuelled largesse heaped upon him or respect for his pals. “A minor character, an ambulatory supernumerary,” is how he writes off one of them who suddenly expires while those surviving are afflicted by habits not usually associated with partaking of too many drinks or drugs.
“I was taken by this vision of a middle-class white man masturbating, by the enormous purple-red and engorged head of his penis which shot out from his tightly clenched fist as he pumped his elbow rhythmically up and down causing it to emerge like a puff adder ejaculating its venom.” Another character arrives for a posh supper “with the hollow-eyed, furtive manner of a teenage masturbation addict.”
Part of the zeitgeist
The narrator’s explanation for the continuing cancellation of his friends is raw yet only part of the zeitgeist. “In the 21st century the post-imperial stiff upper lip has been repurposed as a Pandora’s box into which the Brits magic away all of life’s ills whether they be dereliction, disease or even death. Now it’s gone so far your death might be met with a few terse emojis.”
Other examples of his disillusion with modern life are similarly succinct. “Computers don’t make art, people do,” he reminds us, wearing his hat as an intellectual property lawyer and “Technologies would be value-neutral if humans were machines. Trouble is we’re getting there …checking phones every five minutes” while politicians aren’t exactly helping, “The widowed mother of Parliaments forced to commit Suttee.”
Standards of goodness
Having got all this off his skinny chest, Will Self, more than half-way through the book, at last defines The Quantity Theory of Morality, via the 93-year-old uncle of one of the chums. Enter Dr Zack Busner, a psychoanalyst and Kindertransport refugee whose parents had been killed in the Holocaust. Life has taught him to be more optimistic than may be expected. People can be good, but only by the standards of the goodness around them. Which is why, he says, “The world is filling up with good masseurs, good reiki practitioners and good psychotherapists who tell them to keep on with the sort of behaviour that makes them feel good.
“On the other hand, in other social groupings their actions would be judged as useless, selfish and harmful. The theory therefore is all about ethical standards which are diluted by pseudo-scientific syndromes and pathologies which substitute madness for badness with the excuse of personality disorders.”
This has a wide-ranging effect on society, from “The media being the lapdogs of politicians to everyone being a junior spy these days, rummaging through the minutiae of the lives of others on the look-out for something to use against them and then selling out to the highest bidder.” Naturally no diatribe about ethics would be complete without name-checking 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant whose name also popped up in the Q&A following Self’s reading.
The ethical matter of rights
Since there was a dearth of philosophy students in the room, it fell to me, seated next to Will’s wife Nellie on the front row, to ask most of the questions. This situation soon evolved into a public interview, not that my fellow guests seemed to mind since I was not aware of many complaints. Our conversation culminated on the ethical matter of rights. My view was that you could have all the human rights in the world but they weren’t just there for the taking – like everything else they had to be earned.
That tickled old Will (younger than me at 64) and he suggested we should write to each other. Watch this space!
***ends***
