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FOL: Will Self – on what we think, what we know, what we don’t know, and his new novel Phone

30 April 2018

How do you see life in the twenty-first century? How does it suit you? Do you like it?

Through Jonathan D’Ath, or ‘the Butcher’, we see the world we thought we knew in many different ways. So does everyone else. Yet why would everyone, family, friends, and colleagues alike, have the same nickname, behind his back, for a man who actually knows that none of them know the only real secret he maintains, encrypted in the databanks of his steely mind, that a tank commander is his long-time lover? What!

It’s a puzzle that unfolds in the latest novel by prize-winning author and broadcaster Will Self, whose many books include Great Apes, The Book of Dave, Umbrella, and Shark but is maybe best-known to many for his insightful book reviews in national broadsheets, his sharp Points of View on Radio 4, and his telling appearances on national television.