Tim Martin

Self’s obsessions

A rambling, ambitious, century-spanning trilogy comes to a neat and delicate close

This 600-page, single-paragraph novel shuttles back and forth across time between the perspectives of an elderly and confused psychiatrist, a tank commander in Iraq, an autistic computer genius, the autistic computer genius’s mother and a closeted MI6 spy who thinks his cock is talking to him — which, for this stage in Will Self’s writing career, is pretty much situation normal.

Readers of Umbrella (2012) and Shark (2014) will know the score already, as this is the third instalment in a loose trilogy following Self’s recurring psychotherapist Zack Busner as well as several generations of a family called Death (De’Ath for the posh ones). They will also know that these neo-modernist novelistic tirades, with their spliced sentences, their rambling flow and their mid-line shifts between characters and historical periods, sound like much rougher going than they actually are. Once you jump in, it’s hard to get lost.

In the new novel Zack Busner, who has spent half a century investigating the minds of others, is starting to lose his own. Previous instalments in this trilogy have showed us Busner running a mental-health commune in 1970s Willesden (Shark) and waking sleeping-sickness patients from a 50-year coma (Umbrella); when Phone catches up with him, he is standing in the breakfast bar of a Manchester hotel without any trousers on, comparing his penis to an ‘oiled and wooden-looking’ sausage. ‘I’ve no desires to speak of — not any more,’ he tells the security guard. ‘I’ve attained Sannyasa, y’see — the life-stage of renunciation.’

It transpires that Busner has recently done a King Lear, walking out of the huge London house he owns (‘No, really — a cool eight point five million quid!’) and bequeathing it to his brood of squabbling adult children. Now he wanders up and down Britain, with a homeless ex-squaddie called Simon as his Fool, while his brain wanders back and forth in time.

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