In his 'literary mash-note' to HP Lovecraft, Michel Houellebecq praised the way in which the great horror-writer abandoned the niceties of his genre, disdaining authors who painstakingly created banal worlds into which they would gradually introduce oddness and terror. Lovecraft would spend as little time as possible on this scene-setting, preferring instead to jar his readers by plunging them straight into a world of screaming horror. Although Will Self's debut novel is far from a conventional horror, it uses the same unsettling technique to welcome readers to his literary vision.
Like Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, published two years previously, My Idea of Fun hints at a psychotic mindset underpinning the consumerist revolutions of the 1980s. Both begin with a similar scene, middle-class business people talking over dinner. However, while Ellis minutely catalogues the intricacies of his protagonist's life, Self has no time for the 'cocaine, nude teens adman crap'. His readers are allowed a ten page prologue in familiar surroundings before hurtling into Self's own landscape, 'a wild, primeval place, a realm of the id, where the very manifold of your identity can easily be gashed open'.
While many of Self's stories are set in psychiatric institutions, My Idea Of Fun stands out through the level of focus on the inner workings of an unsound mind. The protagonist, Ian, is an unprepossessing marketing exec, the one remarkable thing about him being his eidetic memory, which gives him a peculiar aptitude with visual images. Beneath this unremarkable surface, Ian is a Freudian nightmare. His childhood is spent in a seaside holiday camp, watched over by his mother, to whom he has an Oedipal attraction - his father is absent, but is portrayed as weak, 'contemptible'. When Ian is on the cusp of adolescence, a huge, fat stranger arrives in a double-size trailer, and quickly asserts himself as the dominant force in the boy's life. The arrival of this oppressive masculine influence, coinciding with the onset of puberty, sends Ian down a dark path.
Mr Broadhurst, or The Fat Controller as he swiftly becomes known, is closely modelled on Aleister Crowley. Like the Great Beast, whose motto was 'do what thou wilt', The Fat Controller is a libertarian, subscribing to a doctrine designed to gratify the id, the impulsive and pleasure-seeking aspect of the unconscious. Later, he is also linked to the Kray Twins, those early proponents of muscular capitalism, mentioning that he is 'near the Vallance Road, so I can drop in on mumsie'. His manner of speech is absurdly bombastic, in keeping with his vast bulk and overbearing character, and he moulds Ian to make best use of his eidetic abilities, convincing him that his powers extend to the supernatural. He is taught to regulate his eidetic vision with a catalogue of rituals surrounding the most quotidian of acts (reminiscent of Crowley's exhaustive documentation of invocations), but occasionally his rage bursts through ungoverned, resulting in the murder of a woman who has annoyed him in a restaurant.
To add to the stew of hormonal turmoil and mother love, The Fat Controller also burdens Ian with a crippling fear of sex, convincing him that his penis will snap off if he ever attempts intercourse. The Fat Controller himself is forever brandishing an outlandish cigar, the phallic totem of power which he uses to cow the subservient characters who surround him.
In the second half of the novel, Self is less concerned with the male psyche, instead broadening his scope to address the nature of commerce in 1980s Britain. The narrative follows Ian through university, where he takes a degree in marketing. His psychic guru is largely absent at this stage, his influence handed over to Dr Gyggle, another of Self's demagogic psychiatrist characters. Gyggle helps Ian to suppress his peculiar urges and fit in to the world of commerce, until he can become useful to The Fat Controller once again.
Self was already notorious for his drug addictions at this point, and he references the great junkie author Burroughs, who described heroin as 'the ultimate product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy. . . . The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client'.
This is the technique used by the unholy trinity of financier (The Fat Controller), marketer (Ian) and psychiatrist (The Fat Controller's stooge, Dr Gyggle), whose esoteric talents and willingness to surrender to the id free from the constraints of morality to become masters of the universe. In a typical motif, Self uses the Lurie Foundation Hospital for Dipsomaniacs, ruled over by Gyggle, as a microcosm of Britian, where the inmates are forced to chant a mantra of brand names as they sink further into degradation.
While Self's first publication, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, was greeted with great acclaim, and he had been annointed in the Granta Best Of Young British Writers list for 1993, My Idea of Fun was met with much more hostile notices. Private Eye's damning verdict summed it up as 'the last gasp of the 1980s Amis-fuelled screech-of-the-urban-psychotic tradition... for all its verbal dazzle, completely detached from anything that might be construed as normal life'. There certainly is a self-consciousness about the novel's presentation, the image of the author looking Mephitophelean in a cloud of cigarette smoke on the jacket, and the phallocentric nature of the book is atypical of Self, who is usually a strong writer of female characters - much more the sort of thing you would normally expect from Amis.
While My Idea of Fun should be considered alongside the likes of Money and American Psycho, and does share some similarities of theme and approach, Self's critique of materialism has more interesting ideas underpinning it - the link to drug addiction and the id, the spritual presence of Crowley and the Krays. There are some classic Selfian flourishes (a character placing 'a femerous receiver back on its pelvic cradle'), and some memorably surreal sequences in which Ian is transported to The Land of Children's Jokes. As in Cock, there is also an interesting question raised about Self's creative process. Once again, the protagonist is beseiged by an overbearing, verbose and bullying assailant who 'addresses my consciousness directly', suggesting an author at the mercy of an oppressive muse.
For me, My Idea Of Fun feels like a small step back after the gothic horrors of Cock and Bull - once again, you feel that Self is working too much in the shadow of a more established author, here Amis rather than Ballard - but the ability to sustain his sesquipadelian prose over the course of a full-length novel, and the surreal vividness of his imagination, set him apart from his peers, also going beyond anything Amis was producing at the time. Although the violence of My Idea of Fun is more contained than American Psycho, the overall tone is far more horrific than that black comedy, a neat trick and evidence of his burgeoning talent.
Next in this series will be Self's 1994 short story collection Grey Area.
Previously - Cock and Bull and The Quantity Theory of Insanity
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