Self, Will. The Quantity Theory of Morality. Grove, London, 2026. F;3/26.
Self is a modern complicated character. He’s published over a dozen novels, short stories, and pieces of nonfiction, attended Oxford, was a teenage drug user but stopped heroin and other drugs in mid-life, has been married (to females) three times but I believe now has a terminal illness at the age of about 65. His style of both writing and life is satirical, humorous, and he’s lived and written very much against the grain. He has said:
I write to astonish people. What excites me is to disturb the reader’s fundamental assumptions. I want to make them feel that certain categories within which they are used to perceiving the world are unstable.
This novel probably accomplishes what Self is after (his name, by the way, is “real”, not a pseudonym although he has been good friends with author Martin Amis, the main character in whose novel Money is a fellow called John Self). The tone is viciously satirical but at times wildly funny. The story is a partly repetitive series of events in the lives of a middle-aged London mixed group of people. The narrators of each chapter describe superficially the same events but switch point of view including genders, and so the styles and preoccupations vary widely from chapter to chapter. They all gather at dinner parties and trips, experience one another’s marital and sexual changes, attend the cremation of one of them, and end up in a dystopian England which has collapsed.
Underlying or overriding everything is the titular theory described to one of the characters by an elderly retired psychiatrist. A real 16th-century theory of money that concerns itself with inflation is the model for this idea that as nonsense and vacant ideology accumulate eventually the moral quality of society collapses.
I found running through style and events an unmistakable aura common to Amis and other male English authors that I called in another review
a sort of bad boy combination of being to the manner born but scorning authority, which type of attitude was popular near the end of the last century. It’s Oh well, I happen to have this damned talent and brains and all this upbringing and wealth but it gets in the way of what’s really important and clear: life is the SHITS when all’s said and done.
But Self is a literary cut above Amis, Hitchens, Barnes, and O’Hagan. His changing points of view, styles and depth of satire gave me a bit of a sense of Joyce’s Ulysses at times. And the satire is wicked and funny:
Why, it’s as if you’ve just poured yourself a nice cup of tea, cut yourself a lovely slice of Dundee cake, when suddenly a huge skeleton, with shreds of putrefying flesh clinging to it, and wearing a hooded black robe, has smashed their way into the conservatory with their scythe, hiked up the pestilential and stinking skirt of that robe, and done an enormous and evil-smelling shit in your Crown Derby teacup.
Self’s intricate storytelling also seemed impressive, but the theory of morality was for me a bit of a stretch:
The ethical equivalent of all this is the speed with which new virtue-signals are spread throughout the web; this indexes enormous flows of hypocrisy and bad faith, which, in combination with a greater and greater circulation of fabricated desires and accompanying ersatz satisfactions, leads to massive inflations in overall badness of behaviour.
My usual arbitrary content and style evaluations overlap a bit. I’d say to really enjoy this story you’d have to be a bit of an English Lit fan, preferably more impressed with the satiric poison than I am.
8.2/8.8 for what it’s worth.
