The Sweet Smell of Psychosis: reissued

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How the Dead Live. My Idea of Fun. The Book of Dave. Will Self's Collected Fiction. The Quantity Theory of Insanity. The Sweet Smell of Psychosis. Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe. Zo schrijf je een goede recensie.

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But although it doesn't stretch Self's considerable talents, it is still a wonderfully poisonous entertainment. In The Sweet Smell first published in England in , Self turns his acerbic, satiric wit on London's venal media cliques. See all Product description. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? Share your thoughts with other customers.

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Self and Rowson make a pungent pair - both left wing, media London establishment jesters as writer and cartoonist respectively, they team up in this short novella to paint a verbal and visual zeitgeist crusher of a book. The story is a simple one, not a bit of it cannot be found in some other tale or parable somewhere: Richard, our hero, finds himself drowning in a sea of drugs and superficiality. His nemesis, Bell, is a modern media baron - a promiscuous womaniser and hairsuite sex god. Mixing excessive substance abuse with paranoid affection for Ursula Bentley - a sort of twenties decadent siren reconstructed afloat on the pillow of narcotics in 90s central London, Richard finds his crush on the flighty Ursula growing with his cocaine fuelled paranoia about seeing Bell's face everywhere he goes.

The Sweet Smell of Psychosis: reissued: Will Self: Bloomsbury Paperbacks

Richard has the nub of goodness within him, bless him. His wish is to make a genuine connection with Ursula, lift her and her tedious sex column out of this ephemeral dirge of media London to a married life of meaning and permanence. Ursula merely ruffles his hair and calls him 'sweet'. The twin poles, and scents of Ursula's perfume 'Jicki' and Richard's psychosis - entwine and grow as the novella roars to a swift and surreal denoument. So the story is basically a bog standard modern parable of values being important than drugs, beautiful people and glamour blah blah.

But the style - Self's amphetiminic and thesauras powered prose and Rowson's Hogarthian grotesque cartoons is to be savoured. But, perhaps just because I'm not British, there did not seem to be anything presslike about the characters; instead it seemed just a vicious, but worthwhile, savaging of the sort of amoral, ambisexual, drug-addled, sensation-chasers who are all too common in every walk of life and line of work these days.

Richard Hermes is an entirely minor features writer who has become caught up in the vortex of young journalists who revolve around Bell, a constant media presence known for bedding any man or woman he sets his eye on, sort of Larry King crossed with a satyr. Richard recognizes the emptiness of the lives the group leads, and still has a sufficient remnant of decency to be repelled by the acts of needless cruelty that they thrive on, however, he's fallen in lust with Ursula Bently, an icy blonde beauty, who hangs with this crowd, but whom he compares to "a diamond found in a gutter behind a Chinese takeaway.

He harbors the improbable hope that Ursula is redeemable and that the two of them can break out of Bell's gravitational pull to live happily ever after.

The Sweet Smell of Psychosis - reissued (Paperback)

But in the end, even as he plans to get away from the City and Bell, to return home for the Christmas holiday, Richard finally gets his chance to bed down Ursula, though the experience proves less than heavenly. If the book is intended to say something specific about the press, it escaped me entirely. No one actually seems to perform any kind of work in the book, it's all clubbing, drugging, drinking, and scrumping. But taken simply as a cautionary tale, a warning that by being with these people you become one of them and sink into the abyss, it worked well enough.

The author's command of and taste for the English language will keep me reading his books.

The Sweet Smell of Psychosis

Self's descriptive prose dead-on captures the complex psychology and the argot of his London Dead End Kids -- the jaded dope-addled, self-loathing predators that inhabit so much of his work. And Self does good chapters and stories but here, as evinced in his other novels -- longer formats tangle his feet and warp his sense of proportion. This novella, which was really too short to publish alone even with the lurid unclear cartoons as filler -- presents the main characters in wonderful detail up front and then drops all these potentially fecund interrelationships in favor of the hero's inexplicable quest to seduce the story's love interest.

Then after exhausting egregiously a huge chunk of the story's double-spaced 90 pages on this quest, Self turns the whole thing into a bad episode of Tales from The Crypt and has the love interest transmogrify into the story's antagonist while coupling with the hero. I can't put my finger on why I didn't like this book. I like his other books Great Apes and Grey Matter are great. You can't help, but feel dirty after reading a book like this, yet there was little humor or even interesting perspective to lighten the blow.