Junk Mail

Will Self Junk Mail (2006)
I'm still not quite able to process some of the opprobrium levelled at this guy, much of which seemingly amounts to he ain't one of us, he's from a posh school and he uses all those big words to look clever but he ain't. The most coherent version of this argument, at least that I've found, seems to be something about how we've all been conned into buying the idea of Will Self as a dangerous anti-establishment figure when actually he writes for the Observer and once consumed heroin on the Prime Minister's jet; ergo what mugs we are! I suppose it's an argument of sorts, although it prompts the question of just who you do regard as a dangerous anti-establishment figure - Alan Moore? Stewart Home? Doctor Who? Some guy in a fucking band? Do you even know what the fuck you're talking about? One might just as well argue that we've all been conned into buying the idea of Will Self as Batman's nemesis and the scourge of Gotham City for all the sense it makes.

Failure to creep into the Houses of Parliament clutching a large sphere of black metal with a fuse and BOMB printed on the side notwithstanding, Self's writing, even with all of those long, difficult to understand words, is rarely less than astonishing, illuminating whatever subject he's chosen to pick apart with such high definition focus of intent and meaning as to make the journalistic norm appear somewhat impressionist; which is what makes him such a delight to read, almost regardless of subject. It's rare to come across arguments so well defined. Junk Mail assembles journalistic pieces from newspapers, magazines, exhibition catalogues, and even British Airways' slightly ludicrous High Life freebie, but the themes benefit from a similar focus to that which informs Self's fiction, or at least his satire given that it doesn't seem entirely fair to call it fiction considering the escapist connotations of the term. The only major difference is that the writing in Junk Mail is less one layer of allegory compared to My Idea of Fun, How the Dead Live and so on, and here we actually get to meet Traci Emin, Morrissey, Andrea Dworkin and others in person, and get to understand them a little better than we might have done otherwise. He even somehow manages to make Liam Gallagher and Damien Hirst seem marginally less twatty.

Anyway, while it's debatable whether or not Self cuts a dangerous anti-establishment figure - pretending for the sake of argument that it's even a meaningful term - he nevertheless succeeds in seeing through the bullshit of modern existence, and communicating what he's seen in a form which reaches a wide audience, even if it's maybe not quite so wide an audience as dangerous anti-establishment rebel leader Luke Skywalker in all those Star Wars samizdat movies. Even if you have to look up a few long-haired words here and there, Self's writing will always reward anyone making the effort, and for something vaguely amounting to cuttings swept up from the studio floor, this may even be one of his best. Additionally there's the bewildering accusation of arrogance, presumably once again founded on the use of words we might have to look up in a dictionary; and it's bewildering because Junk Mail is nothing if not self-effacing - literally, come to think of it - and the fact of the man's writing having personality is never allowed to obscure whatever he's writing about. Even where dark and harrowing, the clarity of this man's testimony is, as always, a joy to read.