Umbrella [Hardcover]

I am rather surprised to say this but, I read all of Umbrella and enjoyed it.

Let's be clear about this. I have a terrible track record with Will Self. I dip in and out of his books every couple of years or so and it's far too easy to quickly assign them to a phase in his career: this is the year he wanted to be like William Burroughs, this is when he was going through a Kafka period etc. With Umbrella, as you might already already know if you've seen other reviews, he's channeling James Joyce. 416 pages of Will Self throwing Joycean styling, any pop culture reference he feels like, a recurring character I dislike and a medical story as a plot framework together sounds well, a surprisingly Kafka-esque nightmare to me as a reader.

And yet, I loved it. I think it is the best thing he's ever written.

I think it's because it is a very contemporary take on the modernist novel, a more humane version of the stream-of-consciousness style. Instead of reading like Joyce's wearyingly arcane prose that always makes me think he's double-encrypted it and lost the key that could crack it for others he captures lives we can recognise in a way that we can recognise.

In the first plot strand we have Zach Busner in the 1970s working as a psychiatrist and watch him become fascinated with the elderly Audrey Death who became locked inside her own head as a result of a disease in 1918. He's convinced he can figure out a way to free her, but after over 50 years disconnected from the world can that really be a good idea? The second strand follows Audrey's life up until her illness which includes her brothers' experiences in WWI (perfectly and originally done) and the third strand, set in the present day, shows Busner as an elderly man himself.

The style will put people off, the use of rare or complex words and references will put people off. Of course it will. But this is a masterpiece and this will, if there is any sense in the world, be studied and appreciated in years to come. It is grimy, it is sordid, it is tender and it is poetic. You can skip every difficult word in this if you like. It'll make no difference, you'll get the feel for what's happening and nothing will be lost except the specific connection Self's making to someone he is intrigued by or a story he's learnt. You'll still feel the raw energy, crackling through the lexiconic veins of this book.

This is Self the innovator at work here, not Self the witty dinner party guest.

`All of it he had foreseen himself unpacking, unsheathing and unfolding, so that the pressed flowers bloomed into dust as he read the missives for the first time since their long-gone recipients set the sheets to one side. It was not - he considers as he raises the candy-striped canvas blind to discover decals of outsized and grinning pizza-eaters being leant against by real people who are grimy in the surprising sunlight that shines on the far side of Fortress Road - the unexamined life that was worthless, but the one un-re-examined by the properly qualified.'
(page 100)

Re-inventing a style well on the way to being consigned to the interest of just historians and academics, with flair and good humour, this is a triumph.

No one is more surprised than I am to hear me say so.

Will Self's "Umbrella" spans a century taking three interwoven strands. One features Audrey Dearth, who in 1918 is a munitions worker who falls ill with encephalitis lethargica, a brain disease that spread over Europe after the Great War rendering many of its victims speechless and motionless. She is incarcerated in Friern hospital where, in the early 1970s a psychiatrist, Zach Busner wakes her from her stupor using a new drug. In the final thread, in 2010 the asylum has closed and the now retired Busner travels across north London seeking the truth about his encounter with his former patient. While that sounds like a fascinating story in its own right, be warned. Self's approach is ambitiously modernistic making this a very heavy going tome even by Self's standards.

Stream of consciousness books can be challenging but good, non-linear books can be confusing but illuminating. Taken together though they are a mess that no amount of clever word play can rescue.

The narrative is a stream of consciousness epic that doesn't break for silly ideas like chapters, or even many paragraphs, most of which last for two or three pages each. Similarly there is no chronological development or discernable structure and time frames and points of view are spliced together, often within the same paragraph. Most of us don't have the luxury of endless hours in which to read and have to fit reading in around life, necessitating putting a book down at some point. Quite where you are supposed to do this in "Umbrella" is a bit of a mystery. Although picking the book up again was more of a challenge than putting it down.

Add to that Self's penchant for odd voices, which while easier to follow than in say "The Book of Dave" still feature oddities such as using a "v" as a substitute for "th" in what is broadly a cockney dialect, but still distract from the flow, particularly as the utterances are often quite random. Of course, this being a modernistic style, useful indicators such as quotation marks are completely old hat, although he does allow the luxury of italics what sometimes but not always show speech.

Your views on what is an undeniably ambitious novel will depend on your tolerance for this modernistic approach. The title is from a James Joyce quotation and the inference is that this is a modern day "Ulysses". To some, the approach may be intriguing and the connections brought out by the style, but to me it detracted from what might have been an interesting look at psychiatry and the treatment of illness and the changes to that over the last hundred years. I'm all for a radical approach if it sheds new light on these things, but not if it merely obfuscates any message or point as this did for me.

The non-linear and jumpy narrative is like being locked in the mind of someone who clearly is in need of psychiatric help if not medication, and yet where you get glimpses of the story line, the message seems to be about the limitations of this and the problems it causes. This is what is so frustrating. For a few pages at a time, the story line sometimes follows something that you can follow, but then Self seems to think the reader has had enough of that luxury and whips it away before you can say "this is getting good now". It seems to want to say something interesting about mental turmoil and modern day life but is so confusing that this is just lost in the flood.

The experience is rather like listening to a badly tuned short wave radio that keeps jumping between different stations. There's no doubting Self's huge intellect but there is none of his sly humour here that can be so illuminating. I cannot help but wonder if a writer without Self's credentials presented this to their publisher, would it really have been published? I'm not so sure. He is, in my view, a fine journalist and commentator but I'm increasingly of the view that giving him a novel to write is like giving a six year old a catapult.

Of course, I could be quite misguided and just didn't "get it". Certainly the Booker Prize panel disagree with me and have long listed it. The judges have noted that this year the focus is on books that reveal more on second reading, and this is probably true of "Umbrella" - but I won't be in any hurry to find out. One thing is for certain, if last year's judges who emphasised "readability" were still in place, this wouldn't have got a look in.

As usual with Mr Self this is not an easy read and I am only about 80% of the way through (Kindle edition)
However the story is gripping if at times confusing - you really have to concentrate to spot the change from one part of the narrative to the next.