La idea de la diversión de Ian Wharton, brillante ejecutivo treintañero, casado con una mujer que le ama de una forma devota y a punto de ser padre, es escalofriante y depravada. Tanto es así, que no puede contársela a nadie. Siendo un niño vendió su alma al señor Broadhust, que entre otras cosas se hace llamar El Gran Controlador y mago de lo cotidiano, un gordo, calvo y mefistofélico, cuyas lecciones le ayudaron a conocer la magia negra y el esoterismo. El pacto que le llevó a adquirir este conocimiento le prohibió, bajo amenaza de perder su pene, mantener relacione sexuales de ningún tipo con mujer alguna.
Esta situación, si bien le ha permitido medrar en el mundo capitalista de la Inglaterra postacheriana, también, en contrapartida, le ha provocado un estrés enorme y por eso acude a la consulta del doctor Gyggle, un psiquiatra que hace extraños experimentos con drogadictos, quien le tratará y oirá sus escalofriantes revelaciones.

Like many a debut novelist, Self adorns his chapters with epigrams from or about his idols — de Quincey looming above them all — and there's a manifesto-like quality about this bug-eyed Bildungsroman, the story of the eidetic Ian Wharton and his Mephistophelian mentor The Fat Controller. It's very much in the vein of his early short stories, mining the scuzziness of late-C20 middle class Britain as the caustic unguent of the free market started to eat away at the foundations of a society still processing the loss of empire. There are phantasmagorical episodes aplenty as Ian's unusual mind — he has the ability to visualise objects, and even people, so accurately that he can interact with and manipulate them psychically — is opened up like an overripe fig. It doesn't really go anywhere though, and is primarily a canvas for Self's sesquipedalianism and lurid imagination. ( )

What does it say about me that I didn't find this book very shocking? For all but twenty pages, it's a satire on metaphysical bildungsromans (romanen?) and a pretty withering criticism of contemporary society. Okay, so far so good. Plenty of people got there first, it's true: revoltingly fat man as a figure of Satan? McCarthy in Blood Meridian beat him by 5 years. Links between repulsive violence and the less productive aspects of capitalist society? Ever heard of American Psycho, Will? Even the supposedly shocking bits are a bit rehashed- getting it off inside gory wounds? Ballard, Crash.
So the 'shock' isn't very shocking, unless you've only been reading novels by Martin Amis and A. S. Byatt for the last 40 years, which is apparently true of the British cognoscenti.
Otherwise? Well, the problem is that Self is very good at the shocking gore stuff, but there isn't much of it and what there is has been, as I said, rehashed.* He's not so good at making his own criticisms of society coherent. Obviously he thinks shit is fucked up and shit, but that's about as much depth as I can find. He hints at the problems of reification and alienation (actual alienation, not teenager-wearing-black-sitting-in-his-room-can't-connect-to-society alienation), but maybe I'm just reading that into it?
Otherwise, the plot twist is a little tiresome (although this time he got in *before* Palahniuk, so that's one for the Brits) and kind of obvious, and there's so much pointless sub-surrealist garbage in the second half that I really started to question if he had any idea what he was doing at all.

On the upside, splendidly written and mean enough that I'd be willing to try his other books. But don't go looking for shock, plot or character here.






* Spoiler alert: I confess the whole 'sucking the severed penis of a tortured, dead dog' thing was unexpected. But imagine how much more 'shocking' it would have been if the dog had been alive. ( )

In a way you have to take this as a kind of fantasy. Ian Wharton could have any number of variations of mental illness and The Fat Controller could be an hallucination or could indeed be The Devil.

You are sad for this boy Ian as he grows up, painfully awkward without a father and pity him his social climbing but distant mother and wonder where his relationship with The Fat Controller aka (Mr. Broadhurst/Samuel Northcliffe) is going.

You wonder a lot about The Fat Controller too and Ian's Eidetic memory and whether there is magic involved or whether Ian is in fact an idiot savant of some kind.... I was disappointed Will Self didn't take the eidetic memory idea to another level but I guess that's the non-fiction fan in me. Will Self's choice of words can take your breath away with their aptness and so do the few truly violent passages that appear. One is never really sure if they in fact happened in Ian's real life or in his imaginative headspace. His forays into a medical cure by Deep Sleep prove nightmareish when he arrives in The Land of Children's Jokes. The characters get crazy with fabulous descriptive passages verging on the psychadelic until you begin to lose the plot a bit. And the plot is that you the reader make a judgement, Will Self likes audience participation and at the end you get to make up your own mind.

There are some seriously funny parts and some violent instances that shock you like when you have first been slapped on the face & wonder what hit you. It's an awakening experience.

Not the kind of book I could read a lot of normally but it totally distracted me from the horrors of my own life while I was reading it ~ and that is probably my idea of fun at the moment.....
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Seems quite a few people objected strongly to this book. Granted it's strange so far...but not yet shocking. I like Will Self's writing and this is no exception. What's interesting is how the main character has an Eidetic memory and what he does with it. ( )

Not for the faint of heart. A convoluted story whose merit lies in the skill of the author's ability to style memorable bits of prose. I read the whole thing from front cover to back, and still am not sure what was really going on. And there are some extremely disgusting elements. But some of the paragraphs are truly priceless.

Here is one such tidbit, which is located towards the beginning of the book:

“Coffee succeeded crème brulée. We moved from the dinner table to the sitting room. The talk was of people, mutual friends who were conveniently not present. Their stock rose and fell on the conversational Nikkei with incredible speed. Someone would say of X, ‘Oh I think he’s idiotic, there’s no point to him at all-’ and then someone else would chime in with an anecdote confirming this. Before long almost everyone present would be vying with one another to come up with examples of X’s awfulness. Within five minutes it became clear that absolutely nothing could redeem X short of the second coming. He was venal, he was dishonest, he was gauche, he was pretentious, he was snobbish and yet . . . and yet . . . Just when X was hammered flat and ready for disposal, the tide turned. Someone said, ‘The thing about X is that he’ll always help you out if you’re in a real jam, he’s loyal in that way.’ The emotional traders swung around to face their dealing screens once more. With X so low he was worth investing in again. Before long his stock was being snapped up by all and sundry. X was now witty, unassuming, possessed of a transcendent sensibility…” ( )