My Idea of Fun: A Cautionary Tale

An international financier and his young apprentice form the center of a wickedly acute story of capitalism run amuck, in a society in which consumerism, violence, and psychosis are the norm and the human soul becomes the ultimate product. 25,000 first printing.

Employing vivid, jarringly unsavory imagery, richly erudite diction and a persuasive, engaging narrative voice, British novella and short-story writer Self ( Cock & Bull ) explores the elusiveness of reality and self-knowledge, the power of formative relationships and the blight of contemporary materialism in his provocative first novel. Part Faustian allegory, part hallucinatory bildungsroman , the book opens with troubled but strangely appealing narrator Ian Wharton, a successful London marketing executive, facing a small predicament. His newly pregnant young bride knows dangerously little of her husband, a psychiatric oddity whose past includes sadistic mutilation and pleasure killing. Should he enlighten her? While grappling with this dilemma, Wharton looks back at his boyhood with an overly affectionate single mother, his years under the guardianship of the malevolent Mr. Broadhurst (a.k.a. The Fat Controller) and his ostensible deprogramming by psychotherapist Dr. Hieronymous Gyggle. Self again proves a master of the grotesque, rendering every image with febrile intensity and positioning them in support of larger philosophical or psychological arguments. An eclectic vocabulary further enriches this ambitious, impressive narrative by a writer already named one of the Best of the Young British Novelists.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The first novel from Self (the novella, Cock and Bull, 1993), a British writer of considerable ingenuity and perversity. A dinner-party question (``What's your idea of fun?'') and Ian Wharton's shocking mental response occasion the memoir of a deranged (or perhaps superhuman) man in the moments before he aborts his wife's baby. Wharton grows up in the Sussex town of Saltdean with an overprotective, social-climbing mother and the specter of an absent, bad-penny father. He discovers that he has an eidetic memory: His brain involuntarily freezes images for permanent retention, and he can ``enter'' the frozen images--a bit like a virtual-reality experience. A stout, imposing older man named Broadhurst, who likes to be called The Fat Controller and is also eidetic, adopts Ian as a pupil and eventually becomes an oppressive Svengali. Strange, psychedelic set pieces accumulate, culminating in Ian's recognition that The Fat Controller is godlike. After some icily perverse, mind-bending episodes (readers will remember an eidetic scene during sex involving Ian's first love and the boorish interruption of The Fat Controller), the novel abandons the tension of its effectively freaky narrative and becomes a fancy-pants writing exercise in sick fantasia. The grotesque sequences are cool, but strangely imitative of William S. Burroughs's iconography: junkies, cartoon sex and violence, evil doctors, capacious realms of the subconscious. In the second half, Ian gets an education and goes to work for a successful marketing agency, during which time he is routinely analyzed by another controlling force: a junkie-ward psychiatrist named Hieronymus Gyggle. With some slapdash juxtapositions of drug-addict mentality and business-marketing philosophy, the novel concludes, likely leaving readers with an expanded vocabulary (``ataraxy,'' ``saccade,'' ``intercrural,'' ``strabismus'') but also grasping for meaning. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Ian Wharton's idea of fun is decapitating and then debauching elderly derelicts on the London tube. Or so says one of his selves in this often repulsive, ultimately fascinating commentary on the duality existent in the human psyche (i.e., as in De Quincey's dreamer, who "finds housed within himself . . . some horrid alien nature") and the seeming insanity of our time, when that alien nature seems too often to be running rampant. Burroughs-like in its hallucinatory approach, this novel also explores the nature of choice and of fate--those outside determinants, personified in Ian's "Fat Controller" (a character from the children's stories of W.V. Awdry), that impose themselves upon our lives. Under the tutelage of his particular mentor, Ian grows to lose all sense of guilt. That he turns to marketing as a profession is no accident either. Marketing is the ultimate influencing mechanism, whether we are talking about products or souls. There is a lot going on here, much of it strange and disturbing. Some will call it genius, others will call it self-indulgent (pun intended). It is certainly not for the faint-hearted. This first novel by one of Britain's rising stars belongs in the serious fiction section of academic and larger public libraries. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/93.
- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.