The Quantity Theory Of Morality, by Will Self: 'laughter in the dark'
Will Self’s latest novel is sincere and heartbreaking, yet it’s also his funniest book for some time, writes Stuart Kelly
In 1991 I had just started university, I was madly in love (and startled it was reciprocated, for a while), and the literary world seemed as effervescent as champagne and with a kick like a dirty Martini. There were long conversations about AS Byatt’s Possession and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, Douglas Coupland’s Generation X and Wise Children by Angela Carter. I remember picking up a new book – The Quantity Theory of Insanity by an unknown called Will Self and thinking: this is something else. Thirty five years later, and Self has written The Quantity Theory of Morality. The difference in the titles is the arc of his work: deranged to determined, from anatomising lunacy to vivisecting what it might mean to be good. I kept misreading the title of the new work as “Mortality” – re-reading it, given the finale is the funeral of a character called “Will” my error seems unsurprising. It is even less surprising when I looked again at his debut, and the opening line of the short story “The North London Book of the Dead”, which reads: “I suppose that the form my bereavement took after my mother died was fairly conventional”, the excellence of the line being that the story is far from conventional.
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In 1991 Self might have seemed a tyro flash in the pan, but his subsequent career has disproved that. The trilogy of Umbrella, Shark and Typewriter, I am convinced, will increasingly be recognised as a milestone work of our days, a resurgence of properly innovative and avant-garde writing. The Book of Dave, his most accessible work in some ways, is ever more relevant in an age of misinformation and misinterpretation. But the literary Self was always in tandem with the media Self – Grumpy Old Men, Shooting Stars (with the modern Dadaists Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer); with the persona of the world-weary, sardonic, caustic author fully formed.
As Nietzsche wrote, “Every profound spirit needs a mask”. Self is routinely described as a comic novelist – he won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize – but he seems to me a comedian like the best of Evelyn Waugh, the Waugh of The Loved One or The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, novels about the funereal and the psychotic. This new novel stretches this critic’s adjectives. It is deliriously poignant. It is heartbreakingly antic. It is sincere and wry at the same time.
What kind of a book even is it? In the first chapter, “The Minor Character” – or is it a standalone story, since it was adapted as such with David Tennant? – the narrator Will is going to a dinner party at the McCluskeys’. The second instalment is called “The Female Characters”, and we are looped back into the same narrative from a different perspective. This time, each male character’s height and membrum virile size, both flaccid and erect, is noted, including, when he gets mentioned, the late Prince Philip. It’s a sarcastic version of traditional realism. If there’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face, then how much less can psychology be determined by trouser contents? Yet we go roundandaround, to use one of Self’s own words, with the characters all being gender-switched, or the whole series of dinner parties and country retreats and opera outings invaded by “Will” inviting Dr Zack Busner, who first appeared in the second story, “Ward 9”, in his first book, or the death of one character, Phil Szabo, always mixing cocktails, replaced with the demise of “Will”.
My copy has so many turned down pages it is practically uncloseable. Self has always been a moral author, and constraints of space mean I can only give one of the philippics. “One between two – and, if we’re lucky diametrically opposed – beliefs, gods, wars, courses of action, genders, sexes, races, classes, football teams, what-bloody-ever… the important thing is always that it be an essentially binary opposition. It’s almost as if the binary basis of the computers everyone’s so addicted to has managed to infiltrate all aspects of their thinking, no matter how rarified or sublime, so that all that they can conceive of is f***ing this or f***ing that”. Therein is the true morality of the book, rather than Busner’s latest idea of a finite amount of goodness in the world.
The perpetual reiterations give the book a claustrophobia that is close to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis clos (No Exit). Nevertheless, it must be Self’s funniest book for some time, and it conforms to my theory that a joke only gets funnier the more you press it. So the characters at first are off to see “Werner Herzog’s production of Die Walküre” and in a later version this becomes “Rihanna’s new production of Salome”, with several betwixt and between. But this is laughter in the dark. I was reminded of the carousel in Strangers on a Train. The final dinner party ends, “I hadn’t gone intending to eat anyway. Only to have the last word”. I very much hope this is not his last word, and Booker judges take note. Get it right this time.
The Quantity Theory Of Morality, by Will Self, Grove Press, £18.99
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