Plenty of bite

Abstract

British author Will Self first began writing about his fictional psychiatrist Dr Zack Busner more than 20 years ago. Busner's been a regular of Self's published work ever since, a reflection of Self's sceptical interest in psychiatry. Busner's last outing was in Self's 2012 novel Umbrella, reviving victims of encephalitis lethargica. Umbrella was short-listed for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, and also gained attention for its modernist prose style. In his latest novel, Shark, Self visits Busner's early psychiatric career during the 1970s. Originally a follower of the unorthodox Scottish psychiatrist R D Laing, Busner has come to believe that Laing is not radical enough. In Willesden, London, he founds Concept House, an experimental community run on unconventional lines, where the transgression of clinical boundaries is seen as therapeutic. It's not necessary to read Umbrella to follow Shark but, from a chronological point of view, it's both a prequel and a sequel to this previous work. A third connected novel to complete the trilogy is promised. Shark continues Umbrella's uncompromising compositional style. It's written as a continuous block of text, with no chapters or paragraphs. Speech is denoted by dashes and ellipses rather than quotation marks and the novel begins and concludes mid-sentence. Characters, viewpoints, and time-frames are liable to change without warning. The plot centres around one night in 1970, when the hallucinogen lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is taken by Busner and the other residents of Concept House, in some cases unwittingly. The inevitable fallout from this event is relayed as Busner remembers it, 5 years later. On the way to detailing this focal scene, Self chaotically unfurls the converging lives of Busner and four other connected characters. One thread, beginning in the 1940s, follows brothers Peter and Michael De'Ath. At the start of World War 2 both register as conscientious objectors. Peter's request is accepted, but Michael's is denied and he becomes a bomber pilot for the Royal Air Force. At the end of the war, Michael acts as the British observer on the Enola Gay, the American aircraft which dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. Another narrative concerns Claude Evenrude. Just before it was deployed, the Hiroshima bomb was ferried across the Pacific Ocean by the USS Indianapolis. The ship sank on its return journey, torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. Evenrude is among the Indianapolis's crew and he watches from the safety of a life raft as many of his shipwrecked crewmates are attacked by sharks. By the 1970s, and profoundly affected by post-traumatic stress, Evenrude is a particularly disturbed resident of Concept House. Jeanie is only tenuously connected to the main action and her narrative orbits the other characters. Raised in an abusive home, she drifts into a young life marked by drug use and sex work. Peter De'Ath has an on-off relationship with her mother; his shame over his wartime record has led him to alcoholism and a career as a sociology lecturer. After the war, Michael De'Ath establishes residential homes for former servicemen. Through Peter, Jeanie lands a job as a care-assistant in one of the homes where she tends to an elderly Evenrude. Readers familiar with Self's previous works will recognise in this book the author's continuing fascination with suburban eccentricity and illicit drugs. Self himself is a former heroin user. There are plenty of nods to popular culture; this too is very “Selfian”. It is whilst watching the film Jaws that Busner remembers the drug-induced events at Concept House from 5 years before. Imagery of sharks pervades the novel, acting as a sort of narrative glue. A creepy man wears a “sharkskin suit”, and Busner hallucinates that his own nose is a dorsal fin. The prominence of Busner's cinematic experience in Shark plays to Self's other preoccupation: technology and the psyche. As a film-goer's experience is arguably one where the real world is temporarily substituted for a fantasy one, Self views cinema as a wilful mass-surrender to a kind of psychosis. I found this novel very challenging at times. Sometimes Shark reads like a deliberate study in incoherence and, fittingly, more than once I felt utterly at sea. But it is mostly possible to understand what's going on and, for those with patience, it is worth persevering. The prose style, although oblique, does suit Self. He's always known how to make a sentence sing, but I've generally found his criticism and journalism compelling, and his fiction curiously hollow. Not so here: Shark's unboundaried text has set him free, and this novel has an emotional resonance that is absent in his earlier works. Now in mid-career Will Self, like one of his sharks, is looking dangerous.