‘What are you doing tonight?’ my wife asked me. ‘I think I might read some of the new Will Self.’ ‘Oh,’ she replied worriedly. ‘Are you sure that’s a good idea? Remember what happened last time?’ And she was right. Last time was Shark. The second part of Self’s modernist trilogy (started with Umbrella; now completed by Phone). I would emerge from the living room after another devastating 100-page reading session, red-eyed, pale, broken. It was taking me around 3 hours to read 100 pages, thanks to an endless series of ellipses that broke up each ‘sentence’. I call them sentences, but they were really more bursts of thought and words that sent me rolling-eyes to the dictionary every half a page. It was a miserable experience and the first Self novel I’ve failed to finish. So to Phone. It’s absolutely batty. But it’s easier to follow than Shark, and more immediately sharp and witty than Umbrella, which seemed a little snowed under with its Joyce references (of which I spotted several in Phone. It’s not that important. I just wanted to tell someone I spotted some. There were probably lots more). I’ll leave you to read the plot in the blurb above, but let me say this: the one character that keeps this from falling off a cliff edge is Jonathan De’Ath, one of Self’s most glorious and wicked creations. He lights up every page in which he appears, and it’s around De’Ath that Self builds his most outwardly political plot, taking the action to postwar Iraq where Self takes on a series of blistering attacks on modern warfare, technology, and the eradication of privacy. Which Self somehow manages to interconnect. I could always take or leave the recurring character of Dr Zach Busner, depending on my mood. So it was nice to have Phone deal with him in a more resonant fashion. It’s not exactly Updike sending poor Rabbit Angstrom out to pasture in Rabbit at Rest, or any of Philip Roth’s late meditations of creeping towards death...but there’s a resounding influence underneath it all. Which all adds up to a very mature work, and certainly his most complete and satisfying since The Book of Dave. If Umbrella and Shark were cacophonous and sometimes shrill, Phone is definitely still loud, but with space for contemplation. As always, there’s absolutely no one else writing like him, and any book of his, I would argue, is essential reading. Even when he’s off the boil. But when he’s on fire like this...it’s unmissable. Highly recommended. (I've tacked on an unrelated recommend below for Self's luminous collection of assorted journalism over the years, Junk Mail. Making up around a third of it are his restaurant reviews for The Observer, which should go down as some of the finest writing of the 20th century. No joke. His portraits of the custodians and staff in each establishment just blaze into your mind, and nails people's entire sense of beings in just a few lines. It's mesmerising)