Dr. Mukti

Will Self Dr. Mukti (2004)
By this point there seems to be only a few by Will Self which I'm still to read, and - at risk of being repetitive - I still don't get the general thrust of the hostility regarding his works. I appreciate that we don't like grammar school boys unless they pretend to have been born within sonic proximity of Bow bells, and I appreciate how we might not like too many long words; but a rock casually lobbed at internet commentary upon Self's writing will almost certainly strike something so thoroughly indignant as to border on character assassination. I don't know if there's any other writer - at least among those with demonstrable ability to string a sentence together - who consistently inspires such bile on the grounds of somehow being the darling of the critics despite that none of the critics seem to have a good word to say about him. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places. A quick rummage around for second or third opinions on this one suggested that at least two of the short stories collected herein were actually random assemblages of long words pulled from an inverted top hat. While it might be said that Conversations with Ord twists and turns a little too much for its own good, if you're genuinely unable to tell it apart from Marinetti's parole in libertà then you probably need an MRI scan.

Anyway, Dr. Mukti is a novella with bonus features more than a short story collection in the sense of The Quantity Theory of Insanity. The title track, which takes up half of the full page count, revisits the familiar psychiatric territory of Self's grotesque pop psychologist, Dr. Zac Busner as he engages in territorial pissings with a colleague, each combatant referring a series of increasingly bizarre patients to the other - more or less brinkmanship with nutters. It's funny and deeply appalling and may even be among Self's best in certain respects, and while it's undoubtedly a freak show, anthropological detachment doesn't come into it - unless you're really looking for it in furtherance of a sneering point, I suppose. I believe the author has had some experience with mental health services, and even his most scatologically debased mutants are granted some dignity while his view - or at least that of Dr. Mukti - seems to be that mental illness can be as much a product of environment as anything.

People as products of their environment seems to be the dominant theme here, although it has preoccupied Self elsewhere. Of the other stories, 161 is probably the strongest, and may actually be the best thing here. It inhabits one of those doomed London tower blocks from the turn of the century, home to a handful of rotting pensioners soon to be rudely gouged from their dwellings in the name of urban renewal. As with Dr. Mukti, an environment and culture is captured in painfully vivid terms of its decay with the sort of clarity which Self's critics presumably consider a cheap holiday in someone else's misery, therefore nyer nyer nyer; but I don't know. I'm actually very familiar with the territory - or was as of a couple of decades ago - and Self gets it spot on so far as I can see, regardless of anyone feeling duty bound to experience offence on the behalf of a working class they don't actually know so well as they might like to think.

As collections go, it's not pretty but it's certainly compelling. Two of the stories were a little messy, I thought, but they don't take up much space and the good stuff is genuinely terrific.