Will

Will Self Will (2019)
A Memoir is the sub-heading, and it's autobiographical rather than an autobiography at least in so much as that it's an autobiography of Self's addiction more than it is of the author, dividing into four seemingly pivotal years of our man's relationship with the arm candy. That being said, the narrative swims back and forth up and down its own timeline, not so much stream of consciousness as following causes, effects and back again and in doing so simulating the way in which memory works, and in which experience is informed by the same. At this juncture it seems to be customary for someone to point out that Will Self is in fact fourth in line to the throne, is never seen without his characteristic top hat and monocle, and has no business telling us about anything which is rightfully the intellectual property of the working class - swearing and smoking fags for example. Also, if we really want to know what it's all about, we should read some Irvine Welsh.

Well, I've tried and I didnae like it, finding it all a bit screechy and pleased with itself whilst revelling in its depictions of people pooing into used syringes then injecting in hope of harvesting just a few remnant traces of lovely, lovely skag; and I don't care if he's from the streets because so am I, if we're going to take that as any sort of achievement. Will isn't from the streets in the sense of Irvine Welsh, but to be fair it makes no such claim, instead preferring to just get the fuck on with it and tell it like it was, with or without instances of cinematically crowd pleasing squalor. The shadow of William Burroughs, another young man of means with a penchant for recreational substances, looms large over Self's life, his writing, and this novel - and it is a novel in the sense of How the Dead Live, Dorian and the rest. We follow his addiction from its north London conception to building sites, Oxford university, Australia, India, and finally to rehab, a circuitous route peppered with cultural debris, earworms, and homilies repeated to the point of achieving mystical escape velocity. The will of the title, quite aside from attempts to give up the smack, seems to be about the desire for forward motion, inertia, and consequent failure. Perhaps inevitably, Will is not quite an easy read and is fairly disorientating, but in this respect seems true to the chemically refined focus of its subject.

'Woodbines, eh,' says Freddy, 'old man fags.'

Will takes one as well, leaving a single slim white missile. Yes . . . old man fags - the fags smoked by entropy itself . . . then crushed into a flying-saucer-shaped-ashtray heading for a black-fucking-hole . . .

Regardless of idiotic concerns about the qualifications of the author, Will communicates something rather than just waggling it in your face, although there's some of that too; and if the author's distinctive voice renders comparison to Burroughs a little pointless - aside from the non-linear thing - it pisses all over Confessions of an English Opium Eater. So that's a thumbs up from me.