Will Self - Phone

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Long and involved, but enjoyable

I enjoyed Phone.  It is long, rather rambling and disjointed and full of distinctive style, all of which I would expect to combine to make me very grumpy, but it's very well done and I was surprised to find myself pleasurably immersed in it.

Phone is by turns funny, touching and full of sharp social observation.  It's about…er…well, aspects of modern life, really.  There are interweaving strands and we jump between stories and time periods.  There is never any indication of the jumps, which happen in the middle of a paragraph, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, I think – you just become aware that suddenly he's talking about someone else in a different place and time.  It sounds like the sort of tricksy, show-offy writing which generally puts me right off, but I found Will Self's style and his portraits of the minds of his protagonists so involving that I didn't mind that much.  In particular, his depiction of a fine mind decaying into dementia is exceptionally good, I think, and he makes shrewd and witty comments on aspects of how we live now, too. 

Some examples of Self's style may help to illustrate what I mean.  This, about the workings of the mental health system, "..he'd passed all the required tests, and eventually gained a full-time position as a clinical depressive," or a description of nurse which I found witty and apposite, "..a hatchet-faced woman who wouldn't now what tenderness was…if you beat it into them with a meat tenderiser."  Or this musing of the former psychologist succumbing to dementia, "…my brain is being choked in a convolvulus of neurofibrillary tangles…"  If you like those, you'll probably like the book; if you don't, you won't.

I do like them, and although 600-odd pages at a stretch was too much for me and I had to take a few breaks and come back to it, I thought Phone was an engaging and rewarding read.  Recommended.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)