Sam Mills, the author of this funny, inventive debut novel (she previously penned a series for young adults), has, apparently, been assured by Will Self that he won’t be suing her for creating a fictional world based on his brilliance as a novelist. There are plenty of other reasons, too, why Self should have warmed to Mills’s anarchic work, brimming as it is with so many Self-like elements: debauched sex acts, insanely powerful mind-altering drugs and grotesque gender reversals.
In The Quiddity of Will Self, a thirtysomething wannabe novelist, Richard Smith, stumbles on the body of his murdered neighbour, Sylvie. Before her death, she had undergone plastic surgery to make herself look like Self. Pocketing a mysterious invitation that he finds by her corpse, Smith becomes steadily embroiled in a literary cult — the Will Self Club — that may have murdered Sylvie. The club is run by a vapid group of London literati whose members are devoted to the transcendent genius of Self’s novels; they hold orgiastic communion ceremonies in which they eat psychedelic “Will wafers” before fellating one another while wearing Will Self masks. But before you can scream “Donna Tartt”, Mills gets in there first: “Did you really think we were some elite group of murderers out to get Sylvie, like something out of The Secret History?” a Will Selfite challenges Smith.
This kind of literary self-knowingness can, at times, verge on the irksome. But Mills keeps the game up with the sheer unexpectedness of her narrative. Convicted of Sylvie’s murder, Smith is subjected to a radical rehabilitation technique in which a psychiatrist “cures” him of his criminality by injecting him with the “quiddity” of Will Self (combined with the essence of Hemingway: a self-cancelling cocktail of the baroque and the pared-down). Mills then leaps ahead, to the year 2049, where she depicts Self having won his first Booker at the age of 82, for a novel about a drug that becomes addicted to a human; Self then dies, prompting a greedy auction of his body parts for their precious, godlike essence.
It’s not clear what this satire of author worship really adds up to in the end, but it is, nevertheless, an ingenious, energetic read, admirable for the verve and macabre imagination with which Mills pursues her quarry.
Corsair £12.99/ebook £7.99 pp387, ST Bookshop price £11.69