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It is motifs such as these that provide the basis to
many of the new stories; most readily in the grotesquely
implausible ‘Flytopia’ and ‘Caring Sharing.’
Similarly, in the wonderfully conceived ‘Design Faults
In The Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual’, he welcomes us
the “terrifyingly tiny world of the urban adulterer”
as throughout his work, Self continues to explore the
exigencies that modern mass urban living places on the
human psyche and the human body. The city in general,
and London in particular, represents a new surface, a
new hallucinatory experience, a sublime reincarnation
of the horror and wonder at the rapidly shifting nature
of the identities and anxieties of his characters and
the inconstant historical realities they represent. “The
idea of the modern urban scape is destructive at a very
fundamental level the notion of scale. People’s idea of
the city that they are living in is so grossly different
from the physical reality that you are actually witnessing.
There is a marvellous disparity between what is
perceived and what it actually is.”
One of the strength of Self’s work is it’s “internally
referential” nature, and in Tough Tough Toys … the
same characters often appear in corresponding stories.
In doing so Self reinforces the common theme in the
collection, “what it is to be an adult, about concepts
and absences of maturity”. It is a theme which is echoed
in his style, as he plays with different modes, with
elements of pastiche and with character for example,
BUY Will Self books online from and
while at the same time being meta-critical, commenting
on that tendency in his work.
Often surreal, frequently absurd, and always written
with a recognisably dark sense of humour, Self’s stories
are satiric rather than simply sarcastic. However Self
is reluctant to think of himself as a true satirist. “The
thing I coined in my own mind is that to be an effective
satirists is an act of factitiousness, and that includes
not talking sensibly about my own work.” While Self
takes his work very seriously, it remains deliberately
ambiguous. “Taking the world seriously is not given …
and that is what I am continually trying to get the reader
to address … but the problem you have got to face is
how to suspend disbelief, you have to suspend disbelief
in your own work, you have almost got to believe it is
true in order to carry it off.”
Since the publication of his first book, The Quantity
Theory Of Insanity in 1991, Will Self continues to be
portrayed as very much the archetypal outsider. His
admittedly “muddled and provisional childhood”,
and his former addiction to heroin for example are
well documented, yet with the concept of the avant
garde as redundant as any notion of a central literary
tradition he feels more at home within the mainstream
cultural sphere. But does being white, middle class and
heterosexual leave him creatively isolated, limited in
comparison to more recognisably racial and gender
specific literary genres? “I have never seen myself as
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