Released in 1998, Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys
was Self’s sixth full-length prose publication, a run of a novel or collection
almost every year since his debut was released in 1991. 1996 was marked with
the release of Junk Mail, his first collection of journalism, leaving 1995 as
the only barren year for Selfians[i].
At the time it was released, I was fresh from the adrenaline rush of Great
Apes. I remember standing in a local bookshop reading through Tough Tough Toys’ opening story, The Rock of Crack as Big as The Ritz, coming
back for a few more pages each day, although I didn’t buy the book itself until
later.
In a 1996 interview, Self commented that his previous
collection, Grey Area, ‘would have been a better book if I’d made all the
stories link’. There is some effort made to rectify that problem in Tough Tough Toys, which is bookended by
two connected stories, the previously mentioned Crack of Rock as Big as The Ritz and The Nonce Prize[ii].
Elsewhere, the main themes are shadow economies and midlife crises, while a
sense of gothic horror abounds. The collection also features Self’s first
American story, Caring, Sharing, and
was only the second of Self’s books not to include an appearance from Dr Busner.
Coming back to Tough
Tough Toys fifteen years later, the two stories about Danny and Tembe, the
crack-dealing brothers, still stand out, along with A Story for Europe. The Rock
of Crack begins with the arresting image of Tembe, a young black man,
leaning against a giant white construction: ‘he picks at a column, picks at it the way that a schoolboy distresses a
plaster surface’. The edifice is a vast sculpture of crack cocaine, which
his brother Danny has discovered by chance, hidden beneath the crumbling
brickwork of their cellar. This unexpected windfall is the brothers’ entry into
a shadow economy, a subterranean city built on the drug trade, mirroring the
world of commerce which exists above them. It even buys them a window to the
world of international finance, represented by a wealthy young Iranian who
becomes their biggest customer.
At this stage, Tembe is a hopeless addict, one of the users
so far gone they ‘saw things that weren’t
there; the filaments of wire protruding from their flesh which proved that aliens
had put transmitters in their brains’, while Danny is disciplined, fresh
from the army and determined not to touch the product. However, between the end
of Rock of Crack and the beginning of
The Nonce Prize, the situation has
changed. Tembe has got clean, and taken
over the business with ‘a fervour to his
materialism that was almost messianic’. Danny, meanwhile, is now a
‘troublesome employee’, serving ‘the denizens of the Citibank futures
department’ whilst maintaining a habit which needs hourly servicing. He feels
his life is governed by The Fates, who will reward or punish him for his
adherence to an abstract set of rituals – a type of magical thinking which we
now know was echoed in the realms of high finance.
His low-point comes with the arrival of his nemesis, Skank, a Jamaican dealer who Danny had
double-crossed in his youth. Framed for the rape and murder of a six year old
boy, and coming down from a crack and heroin bender, Danny is convicted and
sent to the nonce wing of Wandsworth Prison. In prison, Danny accidentally
finds himself signed up to a creative writing course. He has an aptitude for
literature, and his background gives him an unlikely affinity with the
decadents – ‘he adored tales of unnatural
pleasures and artificial worlds’. Danny is entered into a creative writing
competition for prisoners, judged by Cal
Devenish, a moderately well-regarded writer of literary fiction. As he
comes to announce the winner, Cal is disconcerted to learn that the three
finalists are all sex offenders.
There is a sense, in The
Nonce Prize’s conclusion, of the sort of moral ambiguity and chaos also
found in Werner Herzog’s films. There
is no redemption here; Cal Devenish makes a hasty, ill-thought out judgement,
and is rewarded with a handshake from Greenslade,
a psychotic paedophile, ‘the fleshy
equivalent of a wall in a public urinal’. The award is a convenience for
the prison governor, who can use it as an excuse to rid himself of Greenslade,
arranging for him to be transferred out. Meanwhile, Danny is left to rot on the
nonce wing, punished for a crime he didn’t commit, with no reward for his
talent or application.
Of the other stories, Flytopia
features some of the best writing in the collection. Set in Inwardleigh,
Suffolk, a town ‘washed up in an oxbow of
demography’ where ‘self-abuse was
rife and the vet shot up his own horse tranquiliser’, the story shares an
anthropological interest with Great Apes.
Here, Jonathan, a bored researcher,
is plagued by insect-life, until he learns to co-operate with the silverfish
and earwigs which infest his home. Like Irvine
Welsh in The Acid House, Self relishes the details of human-insect
interaction. Jonathan comes to rely more and more on the insects to perform his
domestic duties, first giving up his spare room as a breeding area, and then
making the ultimate sacrifice: his girlfriend returns home from a business trip
and is directed upstairs, where she is immediately ‘engulfed’. Flytopia takes a while to get going, but
the final few pages are filled with macabre thrills.
A Story for Europe
was initially published as a stand-alone story, as part of the Bloomsbury Quids
series. A mother is distressed by her inability to understand her two year old
child; taken for psychological tests, the baby (Humpy) is shown to be abnormally intelligent, but incapable of
making himself understood. A second opinion is called for, and it is discovered
that humpy is talking fluently in Business German. Meanwhile, in Germany, the
finance executive Doktor Zweijarig
is behaving oddly, and spouting gibberish… The idea of a baby talking in an
adult voice is not a new one, but Self is able to play up the sense of
alienation and dislocation in the premise. Following Labour’s election success
in the previous year, the Euroscepticism of the Major administration was
supposedly a thing of the past, but Self is aware that forging a new, European,
identity may be a profoundly unsettling experience for some.
Dave Too seems to
have started with the flyaway observation that ‘there are a lot of Daves around
nowadays’, and built from there into a meditation on surrendering to the flow
of social expectation. The protagonist at first feels ‘amorphous, so shapeless, so incoherent’, before giving in and
adopting a communal group identity, in which everyone is called Dave. It’s
interesting that from here, a story about a man jettisoning his identity, Self’s
next novel would concern Lily Bloom,
a woman literally carrying her past around with her.
Caring, Sharing
imagines a world in which wealthy dilettantes give up reproduction and instead
fulfil their emotional needs with ‘emotos’, giant teddy-ish creatures who act
as a mobile security blanket. Infantilised by wealth, the characters have ‘decided that the whole messy business of
sexual and emotional entanglement wasn’t for them… what they wanted more than
anything else in the world was the absolute reassurance that an emoto would
provide them with’. There is a typically Selfian twist, however; when the
grown-ups have gone to bed, the emotos abandon the ‘slightly infantile banter that passed for conversation among them’
and break out the vodka and cigarettes…
The next two stories have a debt to Ballard in their linking of cars, sexuality and psychology. Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys
was the winner of the Aga Khan prize for short fiction in 1998. Here Bill, a forty year old psychiatrist,
performs a sort of reverse Heart of Darkness trip, travelling
by car from his second home in Caithness back to London, in one epic shift,
swigging whisky and smoking a joint as he goes. On a quiet stretch of road, he
picks up a hitch-hiker, and probes him with questions, trying to provoke some
kind of breakdown. The hitch-hiker in turn asks nothing, but passively accepts
the lift, drinks and Bill’s money. This absence of reflection forces Bill to
examine his own psyche, ‘gutting the carcass of his own life’. It is tempting
to draw parallels between Bill and Will here; Self was 37 at the time of
publication, and split his time between London and The Orkneys. He was recently
divorced, and putting his drug addictions behind him. Could Bill’s reflections
on his past lovers mirror the author’s own?
Design Faults in the
Volvo 760 Turbo continues this theme of vehicular rumination, while
allowing Self to make allusions to two more recurring influences, Jonathan Swift (the narrator, also
called Bill, imagining himself as a
60 foot tall ‘colossus of roads’, piloting an 80 foot Volvo) and Freud, with his images of cigars being
ground into dust and cars grinding to a halt. Transference is the key here: the
narrator inhabits the ‘terrifyingly tiny
world of the urban adulterer’, conducting an affair with Serena, a former model, whilst still
living with his wife, Vanessa. His
car becomes a sort of fetish, onto which the narrator transfers his obsessions,
sees his flaws reflected in the vehicle he drives. He begins to go through the
car manual, tippexing out all references to the brand name, hoping that ‘by eradicating the word Volvo, he will also
annul his obsession with Serena’s vulva’. The story takes place against the
backdrop of the England vs Germany match in the semi-final of Euro 96, the
England team representing another form of emotional transference and vicarious
living.
Self uses Bill’s car as a classic penis metaphor, with his
narrator questioning whether he or his equipment is to blame for his mistakes. In
an ironic twist, while Bill is fretting over his affair, Dave Adler, a mechanic and former psychiatrist, has taken a more
materialistic view, and is ‘giving
Vanessa’s chassis a thorough servicing. As far as Dave Adler is concerned, a
car is a means of transport, nothing more and nothing less.’
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