Sesquipedalianism. Who needs it? No longer Will Self, since he has moved on from showcasing his extra large brain by writing lots of very long words (a sesquipedalian being a lover of long words, as we all know), to using mostly normal-sized ones, but no discernible form or structure. His previous novel, the Booker-shortlisted Umbrella, was the culmination of Self’s decade-long project of whittling down the conventions of fiction until only the bare bones of thought and talk are left. This means no chapters, no speech marks, no page breaks, no paragraphs.
Shark is even more determinedly modernistic. A loosely stitched together fabric of stream-of-consciousness dialogue, song lyrics, poetry and obscenities represent the thoughts of various strung-out narrators who just about tether these 450 pages together. Like all Self’s great heroes, they are clever people driven mad by such cruelties as war, heroin and, in the case of the central character, living in a hippy therapeutic community in Willesden in the 1970s. The inmates of this alternative asylum, while on an ill-advised acid trip, revisit one of the most horrific Allied experiences of war in the Pacific: the mass shark attack that claimed the lives of scores of servicemen when the USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese torpedo.
The Indianapolis had been returning from a secret mission to deliver enriched uranium for the atomic bomb destined for Hiroshima, an irony that, in the crazily-paved structure of Shark, leads us to the women’s peace protest at Greenham Common in the 1980s and one of the book’s most irreverent narrators, Genie. Genie is a classic Self creation: foul-mouthed, iconoclastic and outrageously funny, she is the daughter of a mad whore who raised her on the fringes of the peace movement. Her chaotic childhood is rendered with tender absurdity.
Many other exquisitely grotesque voices fade in and out as the random radio dial that is Shark seeks a signal: the boys of a rural English boarding school; eccentric “onkels and tantes” from an Anglo-Jewish family; and, of course, the corn-fed country boys from the middle of American nowhere going down on their warship in the Pacific, praying, and betraying each other in their last scramble for survival. Each of these scenes could be a novel in itself, and fans of the old Will Self will wish that they were. But since this most restless of English authors has decided that the novel is dead, all we get are disconnected snippets designed to form a ragged snapshot of postwar Britain.
It’s a serious business, deconstructing literature for the 21st century. But it’s also rather sad, because not many people will be able to get through this atomised ramble through the many mad minds in Will Self’s head, and those who have grown up on his dark and beautiful studies of the weirdness of everyday life will mourn their old friend and teacher. This, then, is his most important and least readable book yet. It’s bewildering, exhausting and so relentlessly out of focus that unless you are a disenfranchised English student hopped up on caffeine pills and a hatred of Thomas Hardy, you’re unlikely to make it through to the end, still less part with nearly £20 for it. The publishers clearly know this, so hard do they try in the blurb to make it sound like a pacey novel with a plot. But rewriting the fate of literature is never going to be popular or lucrative, and only time will tell if Shark, like Ulysses or To the Lighthouse or any number of other important books no one has actually read, turns out to be one of those game-changing works of genius that will send shockwaves down the centuries and make their creator’s name immortal.
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Shark by Will Self, Viking, 466pp, £18.99. To buy this book for £16.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134