Just a song a twilight, when the lights are low,
And the flick’ring shadows softly come and go,
Tho’ the heart be weary, sad the day and long,
Still to us at twilight comes Love’s old song,
comes Love’s old sweet song.
A bit like the way sound travels intact across a body of water so we encounter Will Self’s latest experiment in modernism: there is a mesmerizing clarity and vaguely eerie feeling conveyed in experiencing a sound arriving from far away that also seems present and close in the here and now. Wound into Self’s effort to resuscitate some of the more hackneyed aspects of modernist experimentalism, most prominently stream of consciousness, is the question of whether reviving the latter runs the risk of reducing it to process and dogma or whether a version of events playing out in a heretofore overlooked line of sight remains to be caught and examined via modernism’s old optic.
It should be noted at the outset that this kind of thing is not for everyone: despite the virtues of experimental fiction which we will enumerate and champion in this review, some readers gravitate toward the clarity and sense of being at home delivered by the beginning, middle and end of traditional narrative. It may be the case that any comparison of the two is just downright false anyway: the difference here may not rest on the question of which of the two is ‘better’ but might more properly be understood as a difference of kind and not degree. In other words, one form is mostly a quest to understand and entertain onto which is often appended a prescriptive intentionality whereas the other more experimental form has to do essentially with ways of looking at and seeing and describing how time and events are actually experienced internally – not just from a psychological point of view but, we could also add, from a psychoactive point of view or views.
Which brings us to the novel under review: Shark is the second in a planned trilogy through which Self loosely weaves the figure of Dr. Zack Busner who, in the first volume (‘Umbrella’), occupied himself restoring the victims of a paralyzing First World War “sleeping sickness.” Shark begins a year earlier in 1970 with Busner setting up a therapeutic community called Concept House in the north London suburb of Willesden.
Right from the outset, Self appears to relish in a take-no-prisoners approach and launches the reader headlong into wave after wave of language. There are no chapters, paragraphs, breaks, gaps or even inverted commas or standalone blocks of dialogue used to separate voices, tones or locations. This is not to say that the writing does not gradually build toward a shared sense of experience among the inhabitants of Concept House. The overall impact of this meandering flow of detached thoughts, seemingly random jumps across time and alternating storytellers appears to be on one level to draw attention to the literal nature of language itself: the physical reality of meaning-making marks stacked together has the effect of not shepherding the line of sight along the well-worn rut of storytelling but of setting the eye adrift, swimmingly, in a sea of wordplay.
The intention appears to be not only to clear the decks to allow a type of shadow narrative or history to come into view but also to somehow draw parallels between the latter and various unorthodox versions of psychiatric methodology favored by Dr. Busner. For example, Concept House seems more of a social than medical experiment that understands therapy to include a non-hierarchical, communal approach to treatment as when many of the patients join with Dr. Busner in taking LSD. Busner’s little community of mentally ill patients includes Claude “the Creep” Evenrude, an apparent survivor of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, who jabbers on continuously and dumps scat about the place if left unattended. Thrown into the mix are a young woman by the name of Jeanie who, haunted by the torments inflicted at the hands of her alcoholic mother (Moira), takes refuge in substance abuse and ends up leasing herself out to all comers. Moria’s longtime lover is Peter De’Ath who, along with his brother Michael, had registered as conscientious objectors. Peter wings it and ends up digging beets in a commune in Lincolnshire but Michael spends the war flying bombers which culminates with the dubious distinction of being present for the bombing of Hiroshima.
Inasmuch as there can be a pivot or anchor in all this, the collective LSD trip acts as a kind of sinkhole about which Self’s random mishmash of people, events and time periods are held together by means of a spiral of associations and juxtapositions which are sometimes ingenious but other times feel forced and overcooked. The events of that trip are recounted by Busner to his son some years later in the course of a visit to the cinema to see Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws.”
“Jaws” seems to be wheeled in here to act as a frame through which the uber-experience of tripping on LSD and the harmful consequences for all the participants (except for Claude who is somehow rendered ‘sane’) are extruded. Wall-sized images of jagged teeth and enormous gaping jaw-caverns suggest all-consuming, unquenchable appetites that flirt with self-destruction. Lines from “Jaws” like “You go in the cage. Cage goes in the water. Shark’s in the water” reinforce the eat-or-be-eaten undertow beneath the multiple addictions Concept House’s inhabitants continue to fall prey to.
Does the text suggest, in face of all the terrors, trauma, madness and tragedy stacked high in a century characterized by nothing else so much as war, that the very desire and drive to live – life itself – culminates in an insatiable drive for glut and excess and need to consume ourselves and others? If this is one of the takeaways how does it play out in the lives of Self’s particular, contingent human beings? Can Self’s description of Jeanie’s wrestling with the “terrible, remorseless creature” inside her, “one that, no matter what she threw into its vicious jaws…would remain ravenous” really be connected back to more generalized musings about the relation between violence and desire? Of all the allusions, associations and connections made whilst Self’s storylines circle the drain, how can we tell what status to assign to each? And, finally, does it really matter? In the midst of it all we happen across stretches of brilliant horror-comic writing that unlock depths of empathy and majesty in face of a burgeoning mushroom cloud somehow conceived of as a love song to the twentieth century.
