Across the literary pages: Will Self special

The inclusion of Will Self on the Booker long list was like a flashing neon sign pointing towards ‘Serious Literature’ and away from last year’s much criticised populism. In a recent interview in the Observer, the columnist, cultural pundit, professor of contemporary thought at Brunel University and novelist asserted ‘I don’t write for readers.’

Anyone brave enough to pick up Umbrella (at once a reference to James Joyce, to anti-shell device in the trenches, to a retracted foreskin revealing a prepuce, to an intra-muscular syringe and to the structure of the novel which spans out from a single scene) would find, as Mark Lawson in the Guardian also put it, ‘no textual divisions, speech represented without quotation marks and scarcely any line indentations … a single paragraph of 397 pages and around 120,000 words’. But Lawson thought any hard work necessitated was amply rewarded as ‘through the polyphonic, epoch-hopping torrent we gradually construct a coherent and beguiling narrative’.