Will Self - Elaine (2024)

 

Following on from 2019's directly autobiographical Will, Self travels further down the branches of his family tree to formative events of his childhood, with the focus shifted to the prime mover of those events, specifically his mother who died in 1988 leaving behind over forty years worth of diaries. These diaries seem to have provided the recipe and psychological ingredients for this approximately biographical novel, although the novel itself inhabits less than a year of her life with events occurring in order of significance rather than where they appeared on a calendar. Having already read 2000's How The Dead Live, dealing in part with his mother's death*, I felt I knew what to expect, so naturally it's something else entirely.

Elaine is hardly light reading, and yet proves surprisingly breezy for a novel which eschews many of the usual conventions of the form, presenting not quite a stream of consciousness, more like events ordered according to an associative train of thought - which I swear is different even if I'm not sure how to describe it. I've witnessed at least one denizen of social media whining about lines of speech left to roam free within the text, unfettered by those handy inverted commas which at least allow us to pretend we're watching it on telly, but it works fine for me, keeping the dialogue buried firmly in the swirling mists of memory from which the narrative is woven. I won't claim it reminds me of Ulysses because I still haven't got around to that one yet, but I gather it's not the worst comparison that could be made. The style of the writing levels everything out, giving more or less equal emphasis to what happens, what is thought of what happens, what hasn't happened as a result and so on. It can be disorientating, but somehow serves to root the reader in the exact moment of what is read, as distinct from the usual unconscious gathering of information where A, B, and then C adds up to the story we probably expected. If that suggests short change, the effect is, I would argue, emotionally more powerful than what we might have received from the traditional written equivalent of a diagram.

Another cracker, and any peanut gallery season ticket holders still alive to wheel out the stuff about some hypothetical anal thesaurus and how no-one actually reads Will Self, they just say they do because they think they're all lush and that but they don't know nuffink can go fuck themselves, as they should have been doing from day one.

*: This is the impression I've picked up from somewhere, although I'm no longer able to find anything to support the conceit beyond vague literary parallels I seem to recall as present in How the Dead Live, although the main character's name is actually closer to that of the author's maternal grandmother.