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.

Gateway to Elsewhere

Murray Leinster Gateway to Elsewhere (1951)
Sporting a cover which caused my eyeballs to pop from their sockets and roll halfway across the store before I could stop them, I would have bought this one even without the inducement of it being written by Murray Leinster; and I needed something comforting after three hundred pages of How I Did It by Lord Percy. Gateway to Elsewhere is, roughly speaking, a fantasy novel in so much as that its hero is pitted against shape changing djinn across a landscape owing much to the Arabian Nights, but it's a fantasy novel seasoned with sciencey touches - a country inhabiting a parallel dimension, the physics of the djinn, and their King who knows all about our atomic weapons and wants a piece of the action. It's the kind of twisted narrative those with short memories tend to regard as having been invented by Alan Moore, but above all else, Gateway to Elsewhere is a comic novel.

Being very much of its time, its mostly Arabic cast are subject to certain stereotypes - although nothing too mean spirited - and the general attitude to women is all a bit creaky, even psychologically suspect, belonging to the my wife doesn't understand me school.

'May Allah forbid!' said Tony grimly. 'I've never yet talked to a woman who didn't try to make me apologise for being a man, or any who'd have bothered to talk to me if I hadn't been! You are a queen, Majesty, and you're giving me what I take to be rather complicated instructions. I'm only a man, so whatever I do - because I'm a man - you will explain should have been done differently.'

Tony, our generic fast talking New Yorker abroad, likes the ladies of this mysterious realm with their dusky beauty, long legs, and the rest, and that at least two of them are slave girls is as much part of the pantomime as camels and men gruffly swearing on the beard of Allah himself; at the risk of invoking political correctness gone mad amongst other red herrings, this book is honestly only doing what the rest of the culture was doing at the time. There's certainly stereotyping, but nothing which anyone sane would be justified in calling racism, and the narrative is laced with sufficient good intent to offset whatever cheese footprint might be left in the reader's thoughts.

I say comic novel to mean that whilst there may not be actual jokes cracked, the tone is reminiscent of the Andy Griffith Show, with that same gentle, goofball humour taking delight in absurdity and familiar archetypes, not least the ditzy blonde female djinnee who takes a shine to our guy.

He swaggered in exactly the manner of the solitary general he had come in contact with in the greatest war of the human race.

'Admirable!' he repeated in that general's very tones. 'The one who carried me is a very pearl among camels!'

The camel he had ridden turned its head. It looked at him sentimentally. It sighed gustily. It giggled.

Nasim.

I doubt Gateway to Elsewhere is likely to get a reprint any time soon, so it's worth hunting down. It's probably one of the more stupid things I've read this year, but as usual you can tell Leinster had a blast writing it, and surely only the most curmudgeonly dim-bulb could possibly resist its charm.

Confessions of an English Opium Eater

Thomas de Quincey Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821)
I bought my mother a copy of this for Christmas one year, a fancy looking illustrated hardback edition which I assumed she would appreciate because of its vintage and a vague impression I had of it being considered a classic; although I'm no longer sure where that idea came from, now that I've actually read the thing, albeit with some skimming near the end and skipping the extensive tangential footnotes which frequently compress the main narrative to a couple of lines at the head of the page.

In its favour, I suppose you could argue that Confessions examines the subject of substance abuse without any of the usual hysteria, as such foreshadowing Burroughs and the like; and de Quincey seems to have held a more sympathetic view of the lower classes than many of his contemporaries, at least where prostitutes were concerned.

These unhappy women, to me, were simply sisters in calamity; and sisters amongst whom, in as large measure as amongst any other equal number of persons, commanding more of the world's respect, were to be found humanity, disinterested generosity, courage that would not falter in defence of the helpless, and fidelity that would have scorned to take bribes for betraying.

Otherwise, I get the unfortunate feeling that my impression of de Quincey's reputation may have come from Grant Morrison or some other Crowley fanboy banging on about him, and Confessions of an English Opium Eater certainly seems like the sort of thing Morrison would strategically place on his coffee table so as to give you the impression that he'd been reading it, should you happen to pop by for tea and a chat about Austin Osman Spare; and the problem with this is that it's largely unreadable, not in the way people think Burroughs is unreadable, but because de Quincey was essentially Lord Percy from the second series of Blackadder - a precocious upper class twit, and worse - a precocious and overeducated upper class twit who has written a book despite that he can't actually fucking write and has assumed rakish charm alone will compensate for any shortfall. The problem with the book is most succinctly identified by some bloke on Goodreads called Tyler, who writes:

De Quincey's main goal seems to be to twist language into a pretzel. It's a matter of indifference to him whether he actually communicates anything to his readers.

Our boy even admits as much, more or less:

You will think, perhaps, that I am too confidential and communicative of my own private history. It may be so. But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to inquire who is listening to me; for if once I stop to consider what is proper to be said, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part is at all proper.

Out of nearly three-hundred pages, somewhere in the region of twenty are dedicated to the actual subject of opium intake, because de Quincey views more or less everything that has ever happened to him as relevant on the grounds of it having happened to him.

I feel a mystic importance attached to the minutest circumstances connected with the place, and the time, and the man (if man he was) that first laid open to me the paradise of opium-eaters.

Yes, and you seem also to have felt a mystic importance attached to every other aspect of your drearily privileged existence, my Lord, which is presumably why you've written about it all, every last tedious fucking rumination which has ever occupied your thoughts whilst reminding us of your close personal friendship with Wordsworth roughly every third page.

But I have already given it as my opinion, that there is no proportion held between a man's general knowledge of Greek, and the special art of writing Greek; that is, using it as a vehicle for ordinary and familiar intercourse. This advantage, not necessarily or usually belonging to the most exquisite Greek scholarship, I myself wielded with a preternatural address for varying the forms of expression, and for bringing the most refractory ideas within the harness of Grecian phraseology. Had the bishop yielded to the temptation of replying, then I figured to myself the inevitable result - the episcopal hulk lying motionless on the water like a huge three-decker, not able to return a gun, whilst I, as a light agile frigate, should have sailed round and round him, and raked him at pleasure, as opportunity offered.

Oh what sport, your Royal Highness!

Here's why de Quincey's insight is so much more special than that of anyone else on the Clapham omnibus.

Some great advantages I had for colloquial purposes, and for engaging the attention of people wiser than myself. Ignorant I was in a degree past all imagination of daily life - even as it exists in England. But, on the other hand, having the advantage of a prodigious memory, and the far greater advantage of a logical instinct for feeling in a moment the secret analogies or parallelisms that connected things else apparently remote, I enjoyed these two particular gifts for conversation: first, an inexhaustible fertility of topics, and therefore of resources for illustrating or for varying any subject that chance or purpose suggested; secondly, a prematurely awakened sense of art applied to conversation.

I was planning to write a review of Confessions of an English Opium Eater in the form of a single twenty-thousand word sentence mostly squashed up towards the top of the page by a million sarcastic footnotes*, but I can't be arsed, although it would still have been better than this pointless tweedy wank. At least Confessions of a Driving Instructor pretended to tell a story. I'm not in the least bit surprised that Robin Askwith turned this one down.

*: The joke makes more sense on the printed page than read from a screen, so you'll have to wait for the Lulu edition.