The Quiddity of Will Self

by Sam Mills

A ghost hovers outside the window of Will Self's study. She is Sylvie, a beautiful young woman who was recently murdered, who wants to influence Self's latest novel before she moves on... Her dead body was discovered by Richard, a twenty-something idler and literary wannabe. He discovers that Sylvie was a member of the W.S.C. - a mysterious cult of charismatic writers who appear to worship Will Self in a strange and secret style. Gradually, he gets sucked into their dark world of absinthe, cloaks and bizarre Initiation rites. Richard begins to lose his sense of perspective. What is the WSC and what is their relationship to the mysterious Hemingway potions? What did they do to Sylvie... and what will they do to him? Ranging from the present day to 2049, from dictionary rape to literary orgies, from lesbian book reviewers to the Great Vowel Shift, The Will Self Murders is a quirky, comic novel, reminiscent of Being John Malkovich - with the acclaimed novelist, Will Self, as the centre of fascination.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Contemporary, British Literature, 21st Century, Literary Fiction

400 pages, Hardcover

First published March 14, 2012

About the author

Samantha Mills
Sam Mills was born in 1975. After graduating from Lincoln College, Oxford University, she worked briefly as a chess journalist and publicist before becoming a full-time writer. She has contributed short stories to literary magazines such as Tomazi and 3am and written articles for the Guardian, The Weeklings and The Independent.

She is the author of 3 young adult novels, published by Faber, including The Boys Who Saved the World, which is currently being adapted for film and the award-winning Blackout. Her debut novel for adults, The Quiddity of Will Self (Corsair) was described by The Sunday Times as “an ingenious, energetic read” and the Guardian as “an extraordinary novel of orgiastic obsession.” Sam is one of the founding members of the Will Self Club.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant]

So this novel which obsesses about the actual real author Will Self might have been so much fun. It thinks it is, that you can tell, and some readers agree. But for me it was like visiting friends who have a new dog which jumps up in your face and barks all the time. (Oh isn’t he an excitable adorable liddle biddy mmmm yes you are yes you are aren’t you!) Yes, when it’s your new dog you don’t mind so much. I didn’t want to not like this but The Quiddity of Will Self wasn’t my new dog.

Voice offstage : Wait a minute - Being John Malkovich is one of your all time favourite movies.

PB : Yes it still is.

VO : So, The Quiddity of Will Self is the Being John Malkovich of recent literary satires.

PB : That's as may be, but do you realise how contrived that sounds? The Quiddity of Will Self is the Being John Malkovich of recent literary satires. Seriously?

VO : Well, there's no reason to be so mean. I was only saying. Jeez, biting my head off like that. (Sniffles).

PB : Oh, now, I didn't... er...

[Blair · Rating 2 out of 5]

This might seem an odd book for me to choose to read since I am not that much of a Will Self aficionado: I've read several of his articles and a couple of short stories, but none of his novels. However, I was really intrigued by the whole premise and concept of this novel and felt in the right mood for something surreal and meta. Also, it was 99p in the Kindle sale.

The book opens with Richard, an unsuccessful writer, finding the body of his neighbour Sylvie in her flat. Following a number of strange clues, Richard discovers that Sylvie was a member of a cult-like organisation devoted to Self (the clues being a mysterious card emblazoned with the letters 'WSC', posters of Will Self all over the walls, and, er, the fact that Sylvie had just undergone plastic surgery in an attempt to physically resemble her hero). The narrative goes on to skip back and forth through time, exploring the secrets of the Self obsessives, the mystery of Sylvie's death and the progression of Richard's 'career', all in an abstract style which is heavy with references to Self's work. Later in the book, the author also inserts herself into the narrative - or does she?

I started off quite excited by the idea of this unusual story and I was instantly drawn in by the questions surrounding the WSC. But by the time I was a third of the way through I found myself skipping pages, and by the end I had lost all interest. My main problem with this book wasn't so much that I didn't understand it: rather, I didn't care enough to actually try and understand it. I won't pretend that I really 'got' everything that was going on, but I just wasn't bothered about the characters or the plot at all, and I also felt the narrative often sounded amateurish and the voices didn't vary enough between the different narrators. Ultimately I thought it was just too 'clever' and 'weird' for its own good, and nowhere near well-written enough to sustain that type of avant-garde narrative experimentation. Maybe an avid Will Self fan would get more out if it, but it left me cold, I'm afraid.

[Ellie · Rating 3 out of 5]

When Richard finds his neighbour dead, surrounded by images of Will Self, little does he know how his life is going to change. He's attempting to write a novel but his anti-pyschotic drugs are dampening his mind. He remembers a card that fell from Sylvie's pocket last time he saw her and follows the clue to discover a cult that worships Will Self.

The prologue is incredibly random but made me smile in a word geek kind of way. After Richard discovers Will Self, his narrative starts to imitate him and I think the use of unusual words is a little over done. However we are not stuck with one narrative and I do wonder if those that slated the book read the whole thing. Richard reveals quite early on that he is taking clozapine, a drug used to treat schizophrenia, so you start to wonder whether it's all one big hallucination.

The narrative then skips to Sylvie's ghost who is haunting Will Self. Then we go back to a diary written by Richard after a certain event has happened. The we skip to the future and we wonder if we are reading a book within a book within a book...and so on. I really quite liked the future part where Mia stumbles upon what could be a conspiracy. Where religions based on writers is the norm and instead of book to movie adaptations there's book to crime. Then finally the narration passes onto the author, but a different, fictional version. It's all a bit surreal and there are times when I had to stop reading because I felt I was losing my sanity a little.

It seems to be a homage to Will Self. I haven't read any of his novels but I know enough about him to see his quiddity in the book. Quiddity being the essence of something, the defining features. I quite like the word and it is used quite a bit, probably more skilfully than some of the “big words” that are thrown around (or sesquipedalian to use the preferred term). It does however raise the questions of the evolution of language and how the world is becoming dumbed down. The cult itself is reminiscent of Eyes Wide Shut.

If you like unconventional narrative structure or are a fan of Will Self, give it a go. It's certainly going to be a Marmite book, although unlike the yeast extract (hate) I am sat on the fence. There were bits I loved and some that were just too much. The characters go on about their genitalia a bit too much (I believe this is a Self thing) and I found myself tiring of their literary aspirations.

[Jim Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weird, poignant, funny, violent, philosophical, highly imaginative.

[Phillip Edwards · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quiddity means what? It means the essential nature of something, from the latin 'quid' meaning 'what'. And 'What?' was the first word that crossed my mind when I heard something heavy drop through my letterbox one morning. This book was the what - courtesy Sam Mills herself, who sent me a copy as a reward for slagging off Nick Clegg on Twitter. I was delighted because this was one of those books that make my eyes light up the moment I hear about them.

So, I hear you ask, it's about what?

What connects a young man who finds the body of Will Self in 2006 and a lesbian book reviewer in 2049? The WSC that's what. A literary cult devoted to Will Self towards which they are both drawn, along with its shadowy leader Jamie Curren, author of How Will Self Can Change Your Life.

As the young man, Richard Smith, explores Self's body of work he becomes more and more obsessed - possessed even - by the sesquipedalian genius of the real Will Self, whose physical body it was not. The murdered 'Will Self' from part one haunts the real Will Self in part two, while in part three Richard is imprisoned in a tower block writing The Diary of a Murderer under the care? of a psychiatrist called Professor Self (no relation) who is experimenting with some literary potions.

Mia, the lesbian book reviewer, receives a mysterious package containing Richard's diary, that sets her on the trail of the WSC in part four and last, but not least, in part five we meet my favourite character: 'the author' 'Sam Mills' - who reminded me a little of Timothy Cavendish in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, not least because both are literally (and literarily) laugh-out-loud funny.

He - for he is a he, unlike our author who is a she - has written a book called, yes, you've guessed it: The Quiddity of Will Self - the literary equivalent of Being John Malkovich which, he explains to the real Will Self in a letter, "aims to be a bizarre comedy, a murder mystery and a sincere homage to you and your work".

Obviously there's some sex and drugs along the way.

Quirky and distinctly contortuplicated, this novel is so tricksy it comes up behind you, taps you on your right shoulder, then whispers "boo!" into your left ear, while wearing sinister masks on each of several scary faces.

Full of words that jangle in your head, The Quiddity of Will Self is a dangerous odyssey through a cloudy mind - but whose? I'm not even sure how many Will Self's there were. I just hope the paranoia that pervades this novel isn't infectious.

Why are you looking at me like that?

What?

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

It seems from the average star rating that Ms(?) Mills is receiving a less than enthusiastic response to her unorthodox self-examining novel (forgive me). In defence and support:

1) The book reminds us there are more than a thousand words in the English language, with good reason. Indeed, conjoined in non-quotidian clusters, words can prompt arising - even arousing - thoughts.

2) The book examines and comments upon salient social, cultural and personal issues, more often than not pertinent to our (so-called) evolution as a species.

3) It does the above with originality, wit and even tenderness and at no point did I find it boring, obvious or mundane.

4) It is a brave work, even if it didn't always quite work for me.

5) It made me think.

On the downside, there was a lot of cock between the pages. However, if I found it all a bit much to swallow, I expect it's for personal reasons and you can't please everyone. (I suppose I am not exactly the person Ms(?) Mills needs as a reader - round about 87% tautology.) I hope all the insertions pleased the author over the 9 long years it took to write the novel.

Overall: read it! Dear God, it woz refreshing! See you in the coffin.

[Aphie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too many polysyllabic words unnecessarily inserted into a text that did not require it, in an attempt to make the reader feel that the author is some sort of genius, akin to the Will Self character. (I found him, and his worshipper Jamie Curran, unutterably pompous. I never wish to read an actual Will Self novel.)

[Han]

Such a shame…a creative writer but her mind is filled with immoral thoughts of another kind. I had to skip the final chapter completely as it was so explicit and completely unnecessary to the plot. And she took 9 years to write this????
I need to guzzle at least 5 more books in a very short span of time to completely forget about it.

And fyi, there is nothing, absolutely NOTHING comical about this book, trust me.

[Thom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quiddity, from the Latin quidditas, describes the 'whatness' of a being or object. The quiddity of Sam Mills's novel is a heady commixture of sesquipedalian loquaciousness and meta-textual post-modernist tropes. The reader may be swept up in a Joycean feast of language, or engaged in a Sisyphean trudge from novel to dictionary and back.

Everything about ‘The Quiddity of Will Self’ screams cult classic; the clever presentation, the subtle media references to the real life ‘Will Self Club’ inaugurated by Sam Mills, the sense of being a sect within a sect. Like Will Self’s best novels, clever ideas are presented in an accessible and entertaining manner, once you get beyond the grandiloquent linguistic flourishes of the text. It is extremely hard to pin the novel down, however.

Superficially, The Quiddity of Will Self is a story about obsession, a tribute in the style of Being John Malkovich to Britain’s chief purveyor of multi-syllabic portentous prose. The storyline is divided into five sections; the first is a relatively simple crime novel set-up; a young woman is discovered dead in her flat by a male acquaintance, Richard, who becomes prime suspect. The twist is that the woman was undergoing surgery to turn her into the author of Great Apes and Dorian. Richard is drawn into the investigation, and thence into a shadowy underworld of literary self-publicists and the ‘Will Self Club’, a sect of devotees who attend the words of Will with a religious reverence. The text makes repeated reference to Raymond Chandler, but another comparison would be Perec’s ‘A Void’, which also takes a murder mystery as the basis for an experimental foray into linguistics and literature. There is a similar sense of a writer being intoxicated with their own verbosity, revelling in the task they have set themselves.

From here, we move into less familiar climes. A psychiatrist (Professor Self) attempts to cure criminals by infusing them with the ‘quiddity’ of various writers, drawn from DNA samples; a lesbian journalist from the future (Mia) attempts to trace the true history of the Will Self Club; a fictional Sam Mills, male this time, narrates the final section from present day Manchester, describing ‘his’ travails at getting ‘Quiddity…’ published. Throughout, characters quote earlier sections of the book, and reference Self’s novels and characters.

Such an eclectic novel has inevitable problems, and some sections are stronger than others. I found the mid parts of the book to be the most engagingly fecund, with Professor Self’s attempts to distil the unique characters of his favourite authors, and Mia’s dystopian society, plagued by ‘tropicsmog’ and product placement. Others may find the more self-consciously artistic images (‘Sam Mills’ being fellated by a young woman wearing a plastic Will Self mask) to be somewhat irksome. The preponderance of rape imagery is also a little disconcerting.

‘The Quiddity of Will Self’ is a bewildering swirl of ideas, and as such it is extremely difficult to get a handle on. At times, the sheer number of devices employed means that sections are necessarily underdeveloped. On one level, this is a novel about novels; the prologue alone references everyone from Jilly Cooper to Roland Barthes, as well as the ubiquitous Self. For me, this goes beyond simple name-checking, and transforms Quiddity into a Breaking Open the Head style exploration of the transforming potential of great writing, with Self as modern-day Shaman and spirit guide. It has been said that certain authors can never be the same after a character has inhabited their psyche; for Mills, this seems to go further, applying equally to the reader – the novels of Will Self have taken her through the looking glass, as the drug yage does for certain seekers of enlightenment.

Enjoyment of the book will come down to the preferences of the individual – if phrases like ‘meta-textual’ and ‘trope’ get your goat, then this series of texts within texts, perfidious narrators and pop culture references will doubtless drive you up the wall. If, on the other hand, you’re fond of a postmodern jape on the lines of Perec or the films of Spike Jonze, then this is an enjoyable romp. There seems to be a genuine, uncynical enthusiasm to the writing, and the sense of an author rushing to keep up with a flow of ideas is infectious. If nothing else, I am very fond of the idea of the rogue book clubs, re-enacting the crimes of their anti-heroes from Hannibal Lecter to the Poirot series, and fanning themselves with torn out pages of text during their orgiastic rites.

Whilst there isn’t a great deal that is original about ‘The Quiddity of Will Self’, as ‘Sam Mills’ ‘himself’ acknowledges, there are unlikely to be many books like this published during 2012. As historical fiction and straightforward crime novels dominate prize longlists, it is great to see an author wrestling with dystopias and social engineering. The novel will appeal to literary obsessives, who will warm to the theme of fandom taken to excess, and reading as a workable alternative to psychoactive drugs.

‘The Quiddity of Will Self’ is an intoxicating swirl of ideas, a disturbing adventure in the literal psychogeography of the great man’s mind, a provocative and elusive literary adventure – its flaws are worn as badges, defying contradiction.

[Edmund Chattoe-Brown · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm afraid I found this gimmicky without being correspondingly interesting. I am a Will Self fan myself but this has a whiff of "fanfic" about it which puts it in the same slightly obsessive/pervy category as "Pregnant by My Italian Count".

[Grim-Anal King · Rating 3 out of 5]

Absurd yet ironically comprehensible.

[Jason West · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was good, definitely something different than what I normally read, but ok nonetheless.

[Mairi Byatt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love will self, ands as usual this one was hilarious!

[Bridgette Collins · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reading Challenge Prompt #196: The title begins with a Q

[David Hebblethwaite · Rating 4 out of 5]

The quiddity of something is its ‘whatness’, the essential aspects which it shares with other things. This contrasts (we learn in Sam Mills’s first novel for adults) with haecceity, which is a thing’s ‘thisness’, the essential characteristics which make it particular. With that in mind, I’d say that the world could do with more novels which have the quiddity of The Quiddity of Will Self; not to mention more novels with equivalent haecceity to The Quiddity of Will Self.

Still with me? Excellent – let’s go!

We start in 2006: a young middle-class layabout named Richatd Smith strikes up a conversation with Sylvie Pettersson, his downstairs neighbour; afterwards, he finds a card which has fallen from her pocket. A week later, Richard decides to return the card – and discovers a man’s body in Sylvie’s flat. It turns out, though, that the body was Sylvie’s – she had been undergoing plastic surgery to change her appearance to that of Will Self. Following a lead on the card he found, Richard finds himself becoming drawn into the strange world of the WSC, a clique of writers with a Will Self fixation, and a penchant for bizarre masked gatherings.

In the subsequent four sections of the novel, we meet Sylvie’s ghost, frustratedly searching for her killer; Richard Smith a year later, when he’s won the opportunity to follow in Will Self’s footsteps by writing in public in a tower block (though more sinister forces are at work than he realises); Mia, a journalist in 2049, who wonders whether the octogenarian Self’s recent death was as straightforward as it appeared; and a present-day writer named Sam Mills working on a novel called The Quiddity of Will Self – but it’s a different Sam Mills…

I won’t pretend to have understood everything Mills is trying to achieve in her novel, nor all the ways in which it’s in dialogue with Will Self’s work – but I found Quiddity a rewarding and intriguing read nonetheless. Themes of identity and obsession reverberate through the book, and the shape of the narrative is especially interesting: each section brings into question the integrity of the previous one, and the story collapses in on itself repeatedly – so, whenever you think you have a handle on it, something will soon be along to change that.

Reading The Quiddity of Will Self made me think of Leo Benedictus’s Prospect article on ‘hindered narrators’ from a couple of months ago. To my mind, Benedictus conflates a few ideas which don’t quite sit together comfortably; but what particularly interests me here is the contrast between narrators ‘with a limited ability to understand the world or write about it’ (which concept shades into narrators with idiosyncratic voices); and those who speak with the Voice of the Author, whatever the character’s name happens to be. It seems to me that the narrators in Mills’s novel (though not necessarily powerless or inarticulate) are all hindered narrators (in that there are fundamental aspects of their world about which they don’t know – but which we, as readers, do); and that Will Self represents the Great Literary Author with the all-encompassing voice – so the characters’ interest in Self may be read as a search for understanding and mastery of the world (in whatever sense).

It’s perhaps difficult to describe The Quiddity of Will Self in a way that doesn’t make it sound like a curio which will only be of interest to lovers of Self’s work – but I do think the book is more than that. It reminds me a little of Christopher Priest’s The Islanders, in the sense that the shape of the novel is important for its own sake; but there’s so much going on, and the energy of the narrative so great, that one can’t help being swept along.

There should be more books like The Quiddity of Will Self. There should also be more books which are nothing like The Quiddity of Will Self – preferably the same ones.

[J.T. Wilson · Rating 2 out of 5]

A wannabe writer, Richard, finds his unremarkable life turned upside-down when he finds his downstairs neighbour Sylvie dead and her face unrecognisable: as if she was trying to look like someone else. The only clue is a card inviting her to the mysterious WSC, at whose centre lurks a circle of literary brats. What secrets do they hold - and what do they want with Richard?

Okay look. If you're going to go into full-blown weirdness you need something for the audience to cling onto. You either put extraordinary characters into an ordinary situation (the 'American Psycho' approach) or you put ordinary characters into an extraordinary situation (the 'Alice in Wonderland' approach). If you've got extraordinary characters in an extraordinary situation then the audience are cut adrift. Perhaps I've been guilty of this myself in my own writings. Here you have an unreliable narrator who may be making the whole thing up entering a shadowy cabal of Will Self-worshipping, possibly murderous decadents who attach particular value to Cluedo and a cryptic desire to obtain authors' essences. One of the characters is a body dysmorphic trans man who gets plastic surgery to closely resemble Will Self in order to please a frosty lover, and then, having been murdered, hangs around Self's office in spectral form trying to influence the content of his book by haunting him - having a trans man in a book is commendably rare but the rest of the character's motivations are impenetrably alien. That's on top of a scenario that gets increasingly weird and a cosmic five section format.

200 pages in, the book finally looks as if it might pull a 'Cloud Atlas' and become more than the sum of its parts: it jets into the future of 2049 and introduces its first likeable character, Mia, who receives two of the book's first three parts and attempts to separate fact from fiction. This section of the book plays out like a pacy futuristic thriller, right down to the font choice: no surprise that Mills's other works appear to be crime thrillers, as she's clearly comfortable in this realm. The climax is bungled though and the subsequent section by a character called Sam Mills writing a book called 'The Quiddity of Will Self' doesn't work at all, to the point where I'd tentatively suggest it's totally superfluous.

I don't want to indulge in floccinaucinihilipilification here but the flocculence of the plotting is as virulent as Mills's proclivity for pastiching Self's work (great aping?) through elaborate crenulations in the vocabulary choices. The book aims to follow its own bewildering Orpheusian wanderings through the midnight world of the WSC and the fate of Sylvie while acting as an on-page exploration of how far you should take your admiration for an author's work and where the line should be drawn: the battle in Mills's head between Self and, uh, self. It could have worked; instead, I'm left rueing the fact that this could and should have been better.

[Stephen Hickman · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a literary fiction, homage, and desperate cry for recognition which broadly works on all fronts. I lapped this up because the writer can write. Art imitating life imitating art imitating...etc can be a tad confusing and this deliberately plays games with the reader. It took 9 years to write and it shows a little in some parts being better than others. This author likes words. Whereas Amis would you have you grabbing the dictionary two or three times a page, Mills is only marginally less demanding. There are many well educated authors lining up to put their Magnuom Opus out there as the redefinition of the novel and this one makes a valiant attempt, but I think in the end the masked sex orgies and cock sucking are a little cliched leaving me wondering if that is all the upper class are about, if that is the quiddity of life? The attempt to explore Mia's relationship with her father and her chance but lasting encounetr with Kat could have been developed a little further for me. That said there is so much more I could understand about the book if I I had read Will Self, the character central to the surreal action. Should I have to to get the multiple layers? I read this quickly and could not put it down so full marks. I'll check out Will Self for sure. A lot to admire here but the author does verge on being a clever clogs and I questioned whether the book was a vehicle for the author to join the ranks of the literary elite rather than a story for the general reader.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Quiddity of Will Self
Sam Mills (Author)

To say that Sam Mill's The Quiddity of Will Self is an unusual book is something of an understatement. It is part love letter, part murder mystery, part ghost story, and part state of the union address. It follows Richard, an early twenties graduate, who is idling away his life following an inheritance, and the sudden and unexpected death of his neighbour, Sylvie, which leads him onto an unexpected path, as these things tend to. It follows him into a world of Will Self fans, who worship the curmudgeonly author of epoch shaping fiction. It goes from the present day to 2049, through characters of all ages and both genders. It is not a simple book by any means, and it something of a definitely acquired taste. A fine book, nine years in gestation and publishing, but it should find a space on the cult shelf of any good bookshop, but I don't think it has a wide enough appeal for a book group, but it would lead to interesting discussions at least.

[Litro Magazine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Giles Anderson: The Quiddity of Will Self is perhaps flawed, but it’s also a great and very ambitious book, and it needs to be accepted for what it is. You can enjoy the ideas, the invention, and the constant confusion of fact, fiction and authorship—one reviewer got the author’s gender wrong, not so strange when you consider that the fictional version of Sam Mills is male in part five of the novel—but if you’re looking for a sympathetic narrator, you’re unlikely to find one here . . . . As Sam’s fictional agent Archie tells him (with a nod to her real agent, Simon Trewin), “We’re in a recession and everyone is cautious.” Fortunately, though, they weren’t too cautious to publish this strange and original book.

Read the complete review here

[LC · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read a Will Self book once. It gave me a migraine. He's not my only literary trigger (Herodotus has also set me off) but it does make me nervous to read another (there is one in my queue, though there is one of nearly everything in my stupid queue so that doesn't really mean anything).

A book 'about' Will Self, though, that's probably ok. And was. No swirling visions, no stabbing brainpain, no nausea. But pleasantly batshit, and I liked it. Self-conscious and eloquently foul-mouthed. Cocks everywhere, though, to the point that I dreamed of sausages. A thoroughly enjoyable read.

[Becky Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I might write a more fulsome review of this once I've fully digested it. I quite enjoyed Mia. I really enjoyed Richard and Sylvie. I'm not sure how I feel about Sam, largely because it splits from a very satisfying if surreal narrative. I'd come back to it, but I'm not sure I'd reread it in its entirety.

[Paul Bisson · Rating 4 out of 5]

As deranged as much of Will Self's own fiction but then I guess that was the point. Dark, satirical and at times fairly funny this novel felt more like a post-post-modern literary exercise then anything with which I could emotionally connect. Still, all good fun and one of the most unusual books I've read in a long time.

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

I couldn't choose whether to give this 4 or 5. There's so much going on that it's hard to keep a handle on it all, which maybe makes it feel more of a 4 read than a 5 one. But then that seems like marking it more harshly for being ambitiously weird. 4 1/2?

[Tadzio Koelb · Rating 1 out of 5]

Readers should be prepared to travel in time not just to 2049, when part of the book is set, but to the 1980s, which was the last time many of the tricks deployed in this metafiction seemed fresh.

[Alan Fricker · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was almost certainly too tired when I read this.

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

I a rush and picked it up by mistake thinking it was a Will Self book.
After flick reading it gave up. Too many other things to do and just couldn't get into it

[Julie Atkinson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hated it!

[Christian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Q: Inventively meta, or pretentious wank-a-thon?
A: Both, as it were.