Self ’s ‘Phone’ deals with familiar characters’ disconnect from life
For many people, it’s one of the biggest fears of the social media era: the horrifying prospect of being left out of the conversation.
But one can become disconnected through means that have nothing to do with Twitter. Some of them are beyond one’s control, such as illness. Another is that, in certain extreme circumstances, one may grow detached from humanity, such as during wartime.
These themes, and their potentially tragic repercussions, have appeared before in the fiction of Will Self, and they appear again in “Phone,” his conclusion to the trilogy that began with 2012’s “Umbrella” and 2014’s “Shark.” The final installment, a 600page single paragraph, is more exhausting and less focused than its predecessors, but it’s a memorable jeremiad against the folly of war, the insidiousness of aging and the ways in which modern communications can push people apart as much as draw them together.
“Phone” is heavy on intricate turns of phrase and modernist touches — a lack of quotation marks and abrupt shifts in perspective among its many characters — and light on story. But that doesn’t mean its narrative developments are inconsequential.
The novel tells two seemingly unrelated stories about characters who have appeared in Self ’s fiction before. One is Zack Busner, now 78 and retired, a psychiatrist known for his studies on post-encephalitic patients and his unconventional methods of treating them.
Zack is suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. His confusion manifests itself in embarrassing ways, as when, after the book’s stream-of-consciousness opening, he appears in a hotel restaurant in Manchester, England, elegantly dressed in a tweed jacket — but with nothing on below his waist.
Family members had taken steps to avert such incidents. At the insistence of his 27-year-old grandson, Ben, an autistic tech genius who suffers from a speech disorder known as palilalia, Zack carries a smartphone — he calls it “a five-hundred quid worry bead” — so that he won’t get lost or forget to take his pills.
But not even the phone, its ringtone set to “This Old Man,” could prevent embarrassments like the one in the restaurant. This scene is the beginning of Zack’s coming to terms with many challenges, not only his diminished faculties but also his fraught relationships with family members, from past wives to his son Mark, Ben’s schizophrenic father.
The book’s second storyline involves Jonathan De’Ath, an officer of Britain’s MI6 intelligence service, who is known as the Butcher. As his surname suggests — eliminate the apostrophe if Self ’s nomenclature is too subtle — he’s the type of agent whose ambition is not to be a murderer but “to feel what it’s like” because “murdering always got rather too bad a press.”
Like Zack, Jonathan has his secrets and demons, many of which he confides—in a detail likely to separate the book’s fans from its detractors — to Squilly, his lisping, talking penis. One of those secrets is that Jonathan is sexually attracted to men, especially the engaged-to-a-woman and equally closeted Gawain Thomas, a Yorkshire Hussar with whom Jonathan conducts a years-long affair.
In the book’s second half, Gawain, now a lieutenant colonel, is in charge of the Fighting Rams, “the finest light cavalry in the world,” who are policing the Ali al-Garbi district of Iraq. The members of Gawain’s regiment commit an atrocity that gives Self an opportunity for a passionate excoriation of the
second Iraq War and the activities of Britain and the coalition forces.
The final section of “Phone” draws the two storylines together, but, throughout the book, Self is more interested in the possibilities of language than the machinations of plot. He’s fond of elaborate descriptions, as when he describes men on a dance floor as “pumped-up clones in tight white T-shirts, who jitter-jig to the chukkachukka ah-ahh spilling from the doors.”
Self is as scatologically and libidinously freewheeling as ever. But one feels upon reading this book as if the say-anything shocks exist mainly for shock’s sake. Much of “Phone,” especially erotic passages featuring prostitutes, wives and paramours, reads like an older male writer’s idea of an edgy novel. Indeed, much of “Phone” feels like a book that, stylistically and thematically, has been written before, from James Joyce to “Gravity’s Rainbow” to earlier Will Self novels.
What’s new, however, is the condemnation of the Iraq War and the colorful vitriol against Tony Blair and others who led the call for the conflict. And the prose is undeniably vivid throughout, as when Self writes that the wife of one of Gawain’s regiment mates wears “calf-length skirts and blouses with piecrust collars.” This angry new novel may be all over the map, but one could never say that its author has a broken connection to the world.