...true to its title, this is not a quiet book. It's insistent, untidy, and enormously personal. Self works swingingly right in the middle of his chosen modernist territory: his book is a relentless torrent pouring over the reader without any break – no pauses, no paragraphs, no chapters, scarcely an in-drawn breath for its entire length, always with loudly insistent thoughts roaring under the thin attempts at thin surface narration ... Such a novel as Phone requires an extensive, almost punitive amount of work from its readers. But even more so than its two predecessors, Phone is worth the struggle. The book is, in addition to all its stylistic pyrotechnics, a magnificent portrait of fragility, the best thing Will Self has ever written.
The final installment, a 600-page single paragraph, is more exhausting and less focused than its predecessors, but it's a memorable jeremiad against the folly of war, the insidiousness of aging and the ways in which modern communications can push people apart as much as draw them together ... Self is more interested in the possibilities of language than the machinations of plot ... Self is as scatologically and libidinously freewheeling as ever. But one feels upon reading this book as if the say-anything shocks exist mainly for shock's sake. Much of Phone, especially erotic passages featuring prostitutes, wives and paramours, reads like an older male writer's idea of an edgy novel. Indeed, much of Phone feels like a book that, stylistically and thematically ... What's new, however, is the condemnation of the Iraq War and the colorful vitriol against Tony Blair and others who led the call for the conflict. And the prose is undeniably vivid throughout.
Self does a rather beautiful job of sketching in the details of precisely who Busner is, how he came to be here, and where he’s headed next ... It’s all rather rich and full of potential, but then, out of nowhere and without even so much as a paragraph break, we are rocketed into a parallel life ... De’Ath’s back-story — involving his homophobic parents and the challenges of being closeted while pursuing a military and espionage career– is intriguing enough, but it lacks the urgency and emotional depth of Busner’s story ... it never feels like very much to hang your hat on, certainly not enough to propel one through hundreds of densely packed pages ... A lack of plot need not be an impediment to the success of a novel but something has to develop over the course of a work, or else one has stasis, and this is an issue with Phone ... The result is an energetic ride that offers a lot of fun and erudition — probably for many readers that will be enough. Phone presents a thoroughly domesticated, tamed version of modernism, akin to some enormous, armor-plated rhinoceros that’s been so subdued by the forces of civilization that you can walk right up to it and hop on its back. Taming such a creature might well be admired as a feat: but it leaves us wanting a confrontation with something wilder.
There’s been a revival of interest in literary modernism in recent years...But over his last three novels it’s become apparent that Self’s method is different. Phone isn’t an attempt to inhabit the language of modernism but an attempt to exhaust a style ... There’s still plenty of fun to be had spotting references to Self’s lodestars, Joyce and Eliot, in Phone...But these moments aren’t mere allusions. Instead, they show how we live in modernism’s wake, how we’ve internalised its languages and styles so that we can’t think outside of it even if, like Busner, we’ve never read a line of Joyce. Phone will be a challenge to those whose minds have been eroded by the permanent present of the smartphone. It’ll take you a couple of weeks to read all three novels properly. But I can’t think of a better way to spend your time. Self’s message is a perennially important one, brilliantly expressed: only connect.
Self calls himself a 'psychogeographer,' and the novels connect the illnesses of their characters to historical, social, and technological material culture ... Even though Phone is primarily set in the early years of this century, and didn’t require the historical research of the previous books, Self has unfortunately continued to narrow his focus on the personal ... Some reviewers in Great Britain have criticized Self’s trilogy for being too diffuse, too difficult. I found Phone not diffuse enough: too narrowed on two basic stories. Not too difficult but too detailed and repetitive in the telling of these stories ... Maybe it’s because I don’t own a smart phone. I doubt younger readers who do will have the patience for Self’s 617 pages. But I do recommend Umbrella and Shark, and if you find their excesses artful you may read Phone with more enthusiasm than I was able to summon.
A novel of grand ideas, powered by a ravenous curiosity about the role of the technological revolution in our private and public woes, Phone nonetheless bristles with anxiety about the abuse of 'intelligence' — in medicine, in warfare, in software, in love ... For some readers, Self has a reputation as the scarily esoteric Mycroft Holmes of fiction. Never fear: his hurricane of eloquence blows in terrific passages of satire, comedy, even suspense — not to mention his pitch-perfect ear for the jargons and lingoes of modernity. Besides, from the closeted warrior to the eccentric doctor bonded with his on-the-spectrum grandson, Phone deploys several motifs that might feel at home in an upscale TV drama ... Everything flows into everything else. Yet Self’s refusal to lay down anchors in this sea of words may let inattentive passengers drift over buried treasure ... Phone is a glorious trove of sinister marvels, but it might send the incautious user slightly mad.
...everything about this novel has been designed to make life pointlessly difficult for the reader. It is the literary equivalent of an Ironman triathlon: only masochists need apply ... Self’s yea-sayers argue that this incoherence illustrates 'the permeability of selves' ... What will you get in return for all your hard work? Some glib données (did you know that the Iraq war was a bit of a botch job?), some jokes that don’t land and plenty of trendy computer-based metaphors involving lagging, memory, downloading, data, connectivity etc. I am not suggesting that difficulty is always to be avoided — just that you might prefer to spend your energy on summits with a decent view from the top. But the loss in intelligibility simply isn’t worth it.
This modernist narrative is best approached with a commitment to playfulness rather than a determination to hold all its strands close, and Self’s achievement is to make it intensely funny and humane. The book’s cerebral qualities are buttressed by his great skills as an observer and flaneur ... Here, too, alongside the dead ends, the provisional tales and the fallen away characters, are some of the great stories: of damage handed on, generation to generation; of fading parents and vengeful children; of subterfuge and deception as necessary conditions of desire. And, of course, of death, which makes its most straightforward appearance in Phone’s closing lines, though it has been there all along.
De’Ath and Thomas wrestle with demons of their own in Self’s onrushing narrative, more than 600 pages without a paragraph break, inside which nothing much happens but a lot gets talked and thought about. Self makes subtle nods to modernist classics such as Ulysses along the way, unironically making Zack a kind of Leopold Bloom, though in his anxieties and preoccupations he could be someone from the pages of Howard Jacobson. A multilayered, multivocal, and long-awaited pleasure for the Self-absorbed.
Self’s densely cerebral prose leaps between narratives, disregarding linear storytelling and paragraph breaks in favor of extended musings that are often intelligent and periodically insightful. It’s less than subtle, however, in how heavily it hammers home messages about the dehumanizing impacts of war, screen-based communication, and psychological wounds that have never fully healed.
