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SELF DOUBT My Idea Of Fun: Ha Ha By Will Self Bloomsbury Press, London, 1993 Reviewed by Rick McGrath Will Self’s first novel is a showy story of the lifelong adventures of one Ian Wharton (named, no doubt, after the famous business school) and his relationship with a svengali-like character, known chronologically as Fat Controller, Mr Broadhurst, and Samuel Northcliffe. Ian Wharton is unique because of the fact he has an extraordinary form of photographic memory: if he looks at, say, someone sitting down holding a newspaper, he can later conjure the image in his mind, turn it around, and read the copy on the hidden side. This handy skill also works with people. Female people.   Self likes to show off, and this book has a lot of showoff shit going on. For starters, even the way the book is structured is convoluted: A prologue, then Part One, with five chapters, all written in the first person, then an intermission (yeah, really...header and everything), followed by Part Two, complete with exactly five chapters, all written in the third person, and then an epilogue.   It’s just the beginning.   Self loves to twist and control even how the reader is supposed to enter his stories. The Prologue here contains the key: all is in answer to a simple dinner party question - “what do you do for fun?” – and Self’s hero’s answer is, to say the least, shocking in the American Psycho tradition: fuck the severed head of a tramp on the tube. But to say that would only result in one of two responses: yes, you shocked me with your trendy black humour, or you should be locked up in a nut house.   What kind of history would elicit this response is the story that unfolds before us. Set as a kind of morality play, My Idea Of Fun follows the exploits of Ian, our hero, as he grows through stages of unsuspecting, then suspecting, then unhappily self-aware protégé of Mr Broadhurst (a Dickensian blatherer who acts as an early father figure) through to Samuel Rockcliffe, a god-like power and internationally successful financier and marketing whiz who teaches Ian the dark arts of marketing, advertising and the human psyche.   [Aside: As an ad guy myself (20 years in the Creative Dept.) I started to twitch with excitement as I realized my suspect profession – bet I can make you buy it – was going to be immortalized in print. (There are almost no books on ad types). Alas, the marketing stuff is written from research and wishful thinking, and doesn’t discuss the psychotropic world of metaphor and meaning...]   This wacky world goes from the sublime to the subliminal, from the rocky shores of Brighton to the heroin-filled alleys of addicts and marketing executives in near future London. If Part One is setup, Part Two is payoff, with ad agencies, drugs, psychiatric wards and dream-like otherworlds (The Land Of Children’s Jokes) where Rockcliffe/Broadhurst turns into the Fat Controller and the ambiguity of the situation allows Self to wail mercilessly in his thesauristic prose, battering your brain with a vocabulary slightly shy of Shakespeare’s, until you finally gloss over the unintelligible characters as you tend not to notice the individual blades of grass on a golf course. Part One plots along, but Part Two gets psychedelic with fantastic descriptive passages, akin to Celine’s hallucinatory rants in Death On The Installment Plan, except for the muddy aspects of these waters, in which your trip is so bizarre you lose track of how its hanging together.   The point of the plot, such as it is...is to make a judgment. We’re invited in the prologue to listen to Ian’s life story and then use our reactions to make a decision. The clue to our answer, we discover, is somewhere on the cusp between empathy and sympathy – and then we’ll all meet in the epilogue to compare notes.   Ergo, you essentially read Ian’s history while continually revamping your opinions. With the denoue in the denouement still awaiting, the ultimate problem with this conceit is obvious: what if you’re neither empathic or sympathetic to Ian? He’s mostly a fucking idiot. Now, if I was Ian and had his powers, my idea of...   Which is probably the point. Hey, it’s supposed to be funny. So if it continually nails you with barrage of little hits, so what? You want entertainment or catharsis? Lighten up. Self is amusing, competent, inventive, in-your-face, likes to shock, and this story delivers. It fact, it comes across as a Brit version of the minor stories of his Self’s Scottish counterpart, Iain Banks, who also likes to take an outrageous scene and slap you around the head with it. This isn’t anywhere near The Wasp Factory, but it’s as good as Whit.   Because Self is very witty.   I originally didn’t like this story much. But I let the last bit of the story’s self-indulgence colour my opinion. It’s got some great writing and maybe too much insane plot. If I was Siskel & Ebert, I’d probably give this one thumbs up and one down. My Idea Of Fun? You’ll never know. 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