Thinking of attempting the 624-page ultra-marathon that is Phone, Will Self’s latest novel? Then there are a few things you need to know. It is the third part of the trilogy that began with Umbrella (shortlisted for the Man Booker prize 2012) and Shark (2014), although the blurb doesn’t mention those books. And that sets the tone, because everything about this novel has been designed to make life pointlessly difficult for the reader. It is the literary equivalent of an Ironman triathlon: only masochists need apply.
Readers of Umbrella and Shark will be familiar with Zack Busner, a psychiatrist who appears in those novels and various other books by Self. Those new to his work will be left to orient themselves in the dementia-addled mind of an anonymous man remembering scraps of his own backstory for 13 pages, when it starts to become clear(ish) that he is in the breakfast room of a Manchester hotel, naked from the waist down with the manager rapidly approaching. The ensuing fuss takes just a few hours in Busner’s world, but another 90 pages for the reader. If you feel yourself starting to flag, don’t bother flipping forwards to see where the chapter ends: it doesn’t. Oh, and nor does the paragraph. That’s right: 624 pages and not a single paragraph break.
If you make it to page 103, you might find it helpful to know that the interior monologue shifts without warning, in the middle of a sentence, from Busner to “the Butcher”. The Butcher is Jonathan De’Ath, MI6 agent and queasy cross between Bond and Holmes, whose family will be familiar to readers of the trilogy’s first two books. Gulp down an energy drink and take a look at the switch in action: “I’d risen ... I rose … I rise — I’ll rise again … to put on his rancid T-shirt, his ruinous tweed suit — to pick up his staff and a lonely hunt is all I desire! the Butcher mimes along in English before continuing, raucously aloud, in fluent, perfectly accented German: Eh noch Aurora pranget...Schon angenehme Beut erlang-lang-langet!”
The tweed suit is Busner’s; the lonely hunt is the Butcher’s; the German is from Bach. This is the first of many such shifts, as we flip between Busner, the Butcher, the Butcher’s lover Colonel Gawain Thomas, and Busner’s daughter-in-law Camilla.
Self’s yea-sayers argue that this incoherence illustrates “the permeability of selves”. But the loss in intelligibility simply isn’t worth it.
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The sample quoted above contains nearly all the features of Self’s prose in microcosm: awkwardly distended sentences, frequent use of ellipsis and exclamation marks, gratuitous intellectual showboating. It is a distinctive style, certainly, but as it is largely unvaried for more than 600 pages the fractured rhythms soon start to grate. Other pointless obstacles include phonetically spelling out the many acronyms in the book: YouKay, YouEss, Tee-elsie, eyedee, aitchqueue, EmmOhDee, TeeBee (for Tony Blair), to name a very, very few. This might make some sense in speech, or in the mind of a single character, but it happens throughout the book, and I have no idea why — other than to create difficulty and mystical sense of modernism.
What will you get in return for all your hard work? Some glib données (did you know that the Iraq war was a bit of a botch job?), some jokes that don’t land and plenty of trendy computer-based metaphors involving lagging, memory, downloading, data, connectivity etc. I am not suggesting that difficulty is always to be avoided — just that you might prefer to spend your energy on summits with a decent view from the top. Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: these are all mountains worth climbing. For those of you still bent on conquering Phone, don’t say you weren’t warned.
Viking £18.99 pp624
