Jane Antony | janesakura@gmail.com
theridge transmedia
A NUSSU Publication
The stories employ the themes of addiction, desperation and general decay that have sustained Self, a prominent ex-addict himself, throughout his prolific writing life.
In his latest release Liver: A Fictional Organ With a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes (2008), Will Self has written a delectable collection of four stories themed around the title. Self, being the kind of acerbic satirical writer he is, ensures that there are strange reversals of fortune along the way in these stories – as is always the case in his brilliant and disconcerting conceptions.
The stories employ the themes of addiction, desperation and general decay that have sustained Self, a prominent ex-addict himself, throughout his prolific writing life. Although the three stories set in London – Foie Humain, Prometheus and Birdy Num Num – do not possess Self’s habitual aura the material has sufficient appeal to hold the reader’s undivided attention.
In Foie Humain the plots revolves around the lives and some key events of the regulars at The Plantation Club in Blores Court in London. These include the acquisition of a bar boy called Hilary, trips to the art exhibitions or plays of the regulars and funerals for some of the regulars. Everybody in the story is either a hard drinker or being groomed to be one. The decay and detritus that builds up within the club over the years parallels the build up and eventual decay in Val Carmichael’s (The Plantation Club’s landlord) Liver.
Eye-catching in Foie Humain, is a song praising ‘a Red Admiral butterfly poised on a purple spear of buddleia’. Self relates the appreciation of the beauty of small things to redemption from the cruelties of fate.
Prometheus tells the story of a successful advertising copywriter who can sell anything to anyone at any time. But things go wrong when he meets Zeus, an influential entrepreneur with a beautiful albeit manipulative wife. Birdy Num Num opens in Tony Phillips’ subterranean Kensington flat where obsession is normal and addicts spend their days in the realm of cocaine and heroin.
Liver takes off with Leberknödel, which is the fourth ‘lobe’. Refreshingly different compared to the previous three stories, Leberknödel follows Joyce Beddoes, a retired hospital administrator with terminal liver cancer, as she travels to an assisted-suicide clinic in Zurich with her alcoholic daughter. She declines her precisely calibrated dose of poison at the last moment, and experiences an unexpected recovery. The writing is less labored, subtle in its effects and surprisingly moving.
The four stories share an inherent longing for something beyond themselves: they rely on a weird assortment – a Martian, a supernatural vulture, a sentient virus, or an unconfirmed miracle – to animate their mundane worlds of bar, office, street and clinic.
As with much of Self’s fiction there is a heavy emphasis on certain elements of the prose. In each of the stories the city it is set in is described in detail. For example the area of London in which The Plantation club is set in is described from the point of view of an idle wanderer. The intertwining alleys are described along with the masonry, architecture and history of the buildings. This helps to establish not only the surroundings for the story but to also give a strong sense of scale.
Self also continues his love of words. His previous works has at times been overloaded with obscure and obsolete words and although less prevalent in this collection there are still some examples that may require some looking up. Self is also not afraid to use elements of foreign language in his prose and this is most apparent in Leberknödel.
This collection of four stories use the liver as framework and controlling metaphor, but is less interested in the organ as a metabolic regulator than in what happens when it’s damaged beyond repair. At this point, Self’s gift for satire kicks in and the result is prose so vicious it may not go down as everyone’s cup of tea.
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