MY IDEA OF FUN [Paperback]

My Idea of Fun starts off with a gripping opening, continues with a gripping and slightly baffling inner story, and then becomes, frankly, sickening -- but by the end one is so wrapped up in the story that one can't turn away as depravity after depravity comes to light. (I have only read one other book, Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory, that made me feel literally dirty after reading it. While reading this book, I almost choked on the meal I was eating when I came to the protagonist's second visit to the Land of Children's Jokes.) This is a disorienting story, and while I'm tempted to afford it some pat description -- ``a surrealistic romp'' -- that is inaccurate; it is precisely the contradiction between the realistic, drily factual tone in which Self records his story and the ludicrous content of that same story that makes reading it so disorienting.

However, to judge from literary critics, when writing about Will Self, the plot must come second -- no review is complete without the obligatory mention of the prodigious size of his vocabulary. My copy of this book was apparently previously owned by someone who intended using it as a dictionary, because most of the multisyllabic words (and there are a lot, with Self) are underlined. This made it hard not to notice his often remarkable choices of words, but, in the passages where the underliner had not penetrated, I found that the language flowed smoothly and easily (even when the content was unpalatable). Though I pride myself on my vocabulary, there were a number of words that defeated me, but Self tends to place such words in sufficient context there's no real difficulty in figuring their meaning.

The reviews on the back of my copy of the book (which looks different from the picture displayed here -- the front cover has a marvellous illustration of The Fat Controller (mind that capitalised article!) which made his occurrences in the book all the more sinister) declare, among other things, that there are ``more ideas per chapter'' in this novel than in any the reviewer had recently read, and, while there are certainly juicy musings to be had (chapter 8, I believe, opens with perhaps the best metaphorical description of time that I have ever read), this is by no means a novel of ideas. It is an engaging and disturbing story, but don't read it expecting to be enlightened -- just to be entertained, albeit capably and very intelligently.

This book is not a great work of literature, BTW, but not all books are supposed to be. Some are more for fun, and this one is just not everyone's idea of it apparently.

Disclaimer: I am a big Will Self fan. However, I am not liking his new novel (_How the Dead Live_) very much, so know that I can also be critical of his work.