Grey Area, published in 1994, is British author Will Self’s second collection of short stories, and his fourth book. Its stories share some characters, though it is not as linked together as his other collections, and Self regretted this, as he would tell the Boston Phoenix in 1996. The settings are mostly London, in some cases a counterfactual or perhaps future version. These fictions had better be called conceptual, or maybe philosophical, as they are each the ramified growth from an exaggerated idea.
In “Between the Conceits”, the narrator explains to the reader as they sit in a pub that he is one of eight people who more or less control everyone else in London. The other seven include the rival Dooley, who when he sneezes makes “seven junkies overdose in squats off the Caledonian Road”, an ally named Purves who directs “many many thousands of his rather dull little men to wash their cars every Sunday afternoon”, and the haughty Lady Bob, whom the narrator tried to impress with the “34, 571 Valentine’s Day cards that I sent to several of her many divisions of secretaries and data-processing clerks”. There is a hint here of G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday with its council of anarchists, and of conspiracy theories in general. The narrator may be insane.
The narrator of “The Indian Mutiny” is a chat show host remembering an incident in his school days, the suicide of a history teacher driven to distraction by the very conceit of the story: the teacher, Mr. Vello, is dressed like an Indian Army officer, and seeing the better discipline of his Asian pupils, he enlists the “Indian boyz” into a new kind of Indian Army, tasked with maintaining “ab-so-lute order amongst this miserable unlettered rabble”, but when they rebel, taking from him his “ceremonial ruler”, he is reduced to sobbing and wailing.
“A Short History of the English Novel”, commissioned for the Time Out Book of London Short Stories, continues the whimsy, but this time without a sinister turn. The narrator and her friend Gerard share an afternoon in London, Gerard, who “did something in publishing”, complaining of the fragmentation and decline of the English novel, and Geraldine giving qualifications. Gerald mockingly suggests that a restaurant’s waitstaff are all “great novelists hanging out to get more material”, and the one in closest attendance, it turns out, is indeed working on an eighteen-century picaresque from a dog’s perspective. Then, at the Bar Italia, the young woman who delivers the espressos tells them about her dystopian fiction in which the healthcare administrators take over the state with forced hospitalizations and “mandatory injury”. These promising manuscripts sound like Will Self novels, of course, and when the skittish woman gets mad at Geraldine and denies that her work is satire, we are probably hearing the frustration of more than one misunderstood author.
“Incubus or The Impossibility of Self-Determination as to Desire” is a longer story written in the third person. “June Laughton, a prize-winning gardener, and Peter Geddes her husband, a philosopher no less, were having an altercation in the kitchen of their ugly house.” It’s about his habit of wiping rheum from his eyes with a pinky, and then it’s about his writing a “truth table” (a series of syllogisms) on their kitchen table. Later that day they receive Giselle the research assistant who will be helping Peter with his book and June with domestic duties. She stays in the extravagantly described “Rood Room”, homophonic pun intended, built by a 17th century Manichaean, with hundreds of reliefs of gargoyles, beasts, human body parts, painted panels on which members of the sect “sported in distorted copses of painful viridity”, and the central rood screen itself, topped not with a crucifix but with wooden and plaster phalluses.
“Scale” is an account by a divorced opioid addict who lives in Beaconsfield next to the model village, works on his unfunded thesis, “No Services: reflex Ritualism and Modern Motorway Signs (with special reference to the M40)”, and stares at the scale in his kettle. He’s got some royalties from the five police procedurals he’s written, but his father told him his books had “no sense of scale” (the other sort), that they’re missing the relationship between the individual and social change that the great 19th century novels described. There are references to Rabelais (16th century) and Swift (18th) , and a dream in which he is shrunk down and traverses the model village, then is menaced by a giant (because regular sized) maintenance man.
Self imagines a future or alternate middle England engulfed in noxious fog in “Chest”. where everyone coughs and relies on drugs and oxygen tanks. An artist named Simon-Arthur Dykes invites the manager of a newsagent, Dave-Dave Hutchinson—everyone also uses these hyphen-fixed patronymics and matronymics—to his house in the country. Dykes’ wife Jean-Drusilla is a believer, and he, the maker of odd icons, pictures the Redeemer arriving “in a cloud of eucalyptus, freeing up all our passages, gusting through us with the great wind of the Spirit.”
The titular “Grey Area” opens with mostly familiar sci-fi trappings: a highly regimented office run by “the Company”, with windows covered by fabric louvres. The nameless narrator’s department is just called “the Department”, and so are all the other departments, because people within a department must refer to it, capitalized, as “the Department”, which makes paperwork complicated. The minutely ordered office is threatened, like the china shop by the bull, by the specter of a rhino that the narrator remembers from a madcap commercial. And an episode of Newsnight brings in Dr. Zach Busner, an unscrupulous psychiatrist, who features in much of Self’s fiction and gave Grey Area its epigraph, to discuss how physically large an event must be to disrupt our ordered reality, to really be an event. How about the fertilization of an egg?
“Inclusion®” is a scintillating story, the best in the collection. It begins: “You are holding in your hands a folder.” On it are lettered “Cryborg Pharmaceutical Industries”, and “Inclusion, a Revolutionary Approach to Anti-Depressant Medication”. Inside are the materials with which Self and now the reader can assemble the story: marketing materials for the drug, order forms, and confidential materials, a report of an incident at the Worminghall Research Facility by R.P. Hawke addressed to the board of directors. According to Hawke’s summary, the evidence of the unfortunate cyclotron explosion have been removed, but the dangers of Inclusion are now clear. He has included logs from the clinician Dr. Zach Busner, which themselves include Dr. Clive Sumner’s field report on his introduction to the parasitic mites used by the Maeterlincki tribe in South America, whose crushed corpses contain some active ingredient which is is neither narcotic, analgesic, hypnotic, or sedative…
The final story is “The End of the Relationship”, in which a woman roughly handled by her boyfriend brings other couples into discord with what he calls her “pick-pick-picking away at the fabric of people’s relationships,” not so much out loud as with some unwanted power of her mind. It could be a contagion, as he suggests, that Grace spreads around like an “emotional Typhoid Mary”, or it may be, as an inhospitable friend whose marriage she seems to have ruined says, that the “‘talking cure’ has turned into a talking disease”. The woman, also the narrator, thinks there might be something in the air, but is mostly worried about getting back to the boyfriend’s to share a bottle of champagne with him.
All the homodiegetic narrators in the collection sound pretty similar, which is usually meant to be a problem, but it doesn’t really matter in a collection where each story is dedicated to an idea. The hypothetical developed into a narrative is enough to be getting on with without all the particulars of character. And it is not to be regretted that Self will be and sound like himself through each bit of ventriloquism, because he is excellent company, if slightly hectoring. He is arch, didactic, sometimes obscure, and occasionally rude, though only when he can make rudeness funny. His attention dilates very quickly from the ambitious concept to the local and concrete. There are many exquisite images, often of things imagined rather than observed, like the calculations of chess grand masters figured as “many little rivulets of thought running down some hillside of cogitation.” This is a fanciful view inside the brain that might explain how so how many game permutations are considered at once—Self does a lot of thinking about thinking. Here in a different story is a tin of travel sweets in between the front seats of a taxi, which has no such thematic purpose: “I could hear them schussing round on their caster-sugar slope as we cornered and cornered and cornered again.” The remembered sound of ski on snow is like the pill that makes us small so we can fit inside the little box. The preoccupation with scale is brought to the surface in the story helpfully called “Scale”, where Self has his fun with Lilliput as well as Wonderland.
There are suggestions of a different kind of writer, one more conventionally “realist”—and Self’s statements on the subject encourage the quotation marks—in “Incubus or The Impossibility of Desire as to Self-Determination”. Self’s story concerns academic self-making as well as heretic obscenity and the question of free will, so he gives the research assistant Giselle a lot of critical attention. We meet her at the train station “hallooing in the characteristic manner of an English bourgeois”, which is perhaps Peter Geddes’ observation as well as Self’s, and after a few stealthy switches of perspective, we stay with Giselle’s, from which we will see Peter’s debate with his dinner guest, a scientist “big in plastics”. Peter’s wife June takes her out into the lovingly landscaped half-acre behind the house, they part, and Self breaks into the beginnings of an essay on eggheads.
Like a lot of intellectuals she felt herself to be hopelessly impractical. This was an affectation that she had wilfully fostered, rather than a true trait. It allowed her to view the physical (and therefore inferior) achievements of others with false modesty, as heroic acts, as if they were plucky spastics who had entered a marathon.
This reflection itself is the indulgence of a mind ignorant of its surroundings. Giselle, probably thinking some more flattering version of this, is lost in the elaborate layout of the garden, and soon almost bumps into June. Giselle has already been seduced by Peter’s brilliant ideas, those which June finds exasperating these days, and Self works the contrast between the postgraduate and the homemaker through Giselle’s view of June in the garden, “like a William Morris Ceres, gesturing to the fruits of her labours.” Talking to Peter’s and June’s teenaged twins at dinner, she feels herself falling back into “the kind of join-the-dots self-assertion and clumsily plotted intimacy that was still all too fresh from her days as an undergraduate.”
These observations, ironical but not encompassed by irony, sit uncomfortably in Self’s fiction, which is all about the movement from high, absurdly high concept and the gaudy, fine physical detail—call it “low” for simplicity’s sake. (In this story, the two aspects meet in climactic combination in the rood room, where Peter in drunken incubus form and Giselle go at it, “the tip of his tongue describing ancient arabesques and obscure theurgical symbols on her mons”.) Giselle’s false modesties, and affectations “willfully fostered”, and “self-assertion”, are dull middlebrow notions that obtrude between high and low, familiar objects of cultural criticism. Doubtless some readers like this kind of thing, and Self may have been trying to show in brief that he could do it too. There are elsewhere as indicated his objections to the received “realism”, with its refined sense of scale, its sense of what really matters, and these digressions feel a little like offerings on that altar. He is certainly at his best when he ignores those obligations, when his fiction insists with its own authority that a minuscule this and a giant That, with their fussy thisness and grand Thatness, deserve our interest.