The Man in the Red Coat, by Julian Barnes
The book begins on the Clapham Road on a Tuesday morning in May 1986, where the eponymous hero, aged 24, is ‘fraying – no! Fuck it – falling apart’. He has 57p in his pocket, which is nearly enough, if he puts on the charm, for two 30p apple Danishes from Greggs, which his dealer might exchange for a bag of smack. His dealer isn’t interested: ‘Nah, fuck off, willya, Will.’
Will is employed as tele-marketer for IBM, but the job isn’t panning out. He left Oxford with a Third in PPE; not the First he felt he deserved. On one of his Finals papers, he drew a cartoon rather than writing an essay, which seemed appropriate enough at the time because he saw himself as a cartoon. Six-foot five, coat-hanger thin, but with an astounding capacity for survival, Self careers along like the Road Runner, the ground bird pursued by the hapless Coyote in the Looney Tunes cartoon.
He drives his VW into oncoming traffic, he spills petrol on his trousers and then lights a cigarette, and he injects enough junk into his system to kill three dragoons and their horses – but he keeps running in midair.
He does not say precisely how things got this bad, but it has to do with his parents’ break-up. Will’s father, aka Professor Peter Self, is an amorphous Edwardian wedged into his keyhole desk where he ‘pisses’ out books on town planning. His father’s writing is ‘the prose equivalent’, Will thinks, of the meals served in his grandparents’ Brighton home. We see what Professor Self looks like when he’s writing, when he’s eating (‘popping’ forkfuls into his ‘hippo mouth’) and when he’s taking a ‘complacent’ crap in the unlocked lavatory, ‘his distempered flannel underpants down round his lumpy, varicose ankles’. In the finest of his putdowns, Self describes one of his father’s colleagues as ‘looking like a peasant, shitting in the corner of a Brueghel’.
When her much-hated husband leaves the roost, Will’s mother sobs at the bottom of the stairs. ‘I WAS LIKE A SEAL IN BED,’ she cries. It was, thinks Will, ‘such a peculiar thing to say’, and it is around this time that he starts burning the flesh of his forearms with cigarettes and injecting amphetamine sulphate.
His best friend at university is the snooty ‘Caius’, whose own father repeatedly raped him as a child: readers of Edward St Aubyn know the story already. Anyway, this sadist-rapistincest-paedo-dad, who despises his son’s other friends, recognises in Will a fellow member of the Devil’s Party and invites him to his club.
This is a horribly funny and in many ways brilliant book, quite the best pharma-picaresque memoir I’ve read. Self knows it’s a clichéd genre that his character has to hit rock bottom and then see the light, which is precisely what happens. He writes to formula, but with an articulacy that verges on the insane. His monotone voice shifts between two registers, signalled by italics, but never changes gear.
Not all writers speak in a way that sounds like their prose, but Self does: in his lugubrious public appearances, he is similarly in the driving seat of an automatic car. The account of rehab, where they are recommended ‘a work of cod-spirituality called The RoadLess-fucking-travelled’, is comedy gold, and I hope some of Self’s fellowtravellers on the Programme will get their revenge.
Will Self has been posing as a clovenfooted shock jock for so long now that he’s become an establishment figure, as essential to the BBC as Stephen Fry. He sneers and jeers like a panto villain, and his readers accordingly boo and hiss on every page.
But the sun is going down on his particular brand of bullying alpha male, and he knows this too. In the book’s final paragraph, Self imagines ‘Will-of-thefuture’ and sees ‘a ghost in full sunlight on a crowded street, and you can see right through him’.