Umbrella by Will Self

...Catching a glimpse of his rather hippyish

form in a mirror, he wonders at this

atavism of apparel, is it an inversion

of foetal ontogeny, in which the phenotype

passes through previous fashion stages?

I’m a big fan of Will Self and his titanium folding bike. Through him I’ve become a fan of Matthew De Abaitua, his one-time amanuensis; Russell Hoban; fan and novelist Sam Mills, and there are probably more authors I’ve found and loved because of his scholarly erudition.

However, James Joyce ain’t ever going to be one.

Which is odd if you consider my track record of loving modern and post-modern authors who creatively re-frame a traditional narrative.

Unfortunately, for me at least, if not for the swathes of blown-away reviewers and columnists who lavished praise and called for its inclusion on the Booker list in 2012, I quickly came to realise both the significance of the title and of the opening epigraph: “A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.” (James Joyce, Ulysses)

It’s a 397-page-long paragraph.

Whilst that doesn’t explain the umbrella, of which more later, Umbrella is written with a significant nod to the modernist (sorry, Modernist) stylings of Joyce and T.S. Eliot. Self writes seamlessly, literally, with no speech marks and with internal interjections and random song lyrics italicized to differentiate, switching between narrators and authorial voice sometimes in the middle of sentences. I think I groaned aloud at the sheer mental weight of his first page. Such was the effort of reading at first that I went off and found something which ostensibly promised to be much more fun to read in the meantime, but once I was forced to return, partly out of duty and loyalty, I found you get used to it. As with everything, you begin to pick through the layered references, spot the change of voice coming (usually when one character or other is recalling to mind another, which conjures their stream of thought to the page), and have your dictionary app open to quickly check Self’s habitual sesquipedalian loquaciousness*. And it all starts to come together into one hell of a novel.

It certainly doesn’t lack in some of Self’s best-loved traits and tropes; his unique appreciation/critique of modern architecture and the psychogeography of London**, his cutting wit and astounding erudition, the often saturnine presentation of characters’ motivations and the reality of life juxtaposed with the ideals of youth and/or inexperience, and as ever, his blunderbuss is loaded with comment about the most diverse of subjects – reading (or listening to) Will Self is an education in itself***. His use of linguistic echoes across narratives sews together the disparate tapestries (of Audrey De’Ath as a child and as a young feminist, her brothers Stanley and Albert on their distinctly different parabolas, Self mainstay Dr Zac Busner in 1971 and again in 2010 as an old man) and his treatment of the experience of Busner’s ‘enkies’, heretofore undiagnosed Encephalitis lethargica patients (of which Audrey is one), shows again his depth of understanding and is presented in an outstandingly relatable fashion. His commitment to the style and technique of the work is also astonishing, with metaphors and descriptions from each discrete era and situation cropping up as descriptions of others, such as the system for packing artillery shells in the Arsenal used to describe the encapsulating of Busner’s non-miracle Miracle Drug L-DOPA in his asylum.

And the umbrella? Self’s most often used echoing symbol, it crops up again and again, in Audrey’s workplace (she answers correspondence to her employers, an umbrella manufacturer), in similes used to describe injections, on the First World War battlefield, in the circles of competing siblings – the pacifists of Stanley and the Government men of Alfred - is even spotted on the moon rover, and, in the form of absence, in the life of Zac Busner and the brother he never visits in his own institution.

So, a conclusion then. I won't lie, it’s tiring to read, but as with everything rewarding, it starts out as difficult and gets less so with practice. It’s a grower, and if you can get over the sheer density of language and profoundly destabilizing manner of switching timeframes mid-sentence, you might just come out the other end agreeing with Sam Leith that this could be Self’s best novel yet.

I don’t.

It’s really, really good, but I prefer his more readable if less technically ambitious earlier novels. It’s hard to beat a Great Ape.

*YES! I’ve now managed to say that in two discrete sentences!

**Much of which passes me by as I could not care tinkers cuss for the layout and architecture of London, for no good reason that I can divine.

*** Incidentally, his quote regarding the front window seat on the top of a double-decker bus he reuses in his brilliant Omnibus radio series.

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