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Published to rave reviews in the United Kingdom, Phone tells the story of two men: Zack Busner and Jonathan De'Ath.
Busner is a psychiatrist who has made his name through his unorthodox treatment of psychological damage, such as giving the controversial drug L-DOPA to patients ravaged by encephalitis, or administering LSD to World War II PTSD-sufferers. But now Busner's own mind is fraying: Alzheimer's is shredding his memory and his newest possession is a shiny smartphone given to him by his introverted grandson Ben. Meanwhile, Jonathan De'Ath, aka "the Butcher," is an MI6 man who remains a mystery even to those closest to him, be it his washed-up old university lecturer father, his jumbling-bumbling mother, his hippy-dippy brothers, his spooky colleagues or multitudinous lovers. All of De'Ath's acquaintances apply the "Butcher" epithet to him, and perhaps there is only one person who thinks of him with tenderness, a man he keeps top secret, encrypted in the databanks of his steely mind: Colonel Gawain Thomas, husband, father, highly-trained tank commander, and Jonathan De'Ath's long-time lover.
As Busner's mind totters and Jonathan and Gawain's affair teeters, they come to face the interconnectedness of all lives, online and off, while an irritating phone continues to ring… ring… ring…
As a child, Elizabeth had no formal education, and yet she was able to self-educate, thanks to her library card. With the advent of technology, do you think libraries are still important to society? If so, why?
Absolutely. Just because the majority can afford phones, tablets and computers, doesn't mean that everyone can. The pandemic was a great illuminator for that disparity. I think the library is an undeniable gift to any community.
-Kimberly_D
BookBrowsers Ask Nancy Jensen, author of In Our Midst
@kim.kovacs A few people have questioned me on an historical point, but the challenges tend to come from what they've heard rather than from what they've studied or experienced. I don't have all the sources for either of my novels instantly at my fingertips all the time, but I do have the sources...
-Nancy_J
"Starred Review. The final installment of Self's trilogy is an invigorating and challenging union of politics, history, and literary finesse." - Booklist
"Starred Review. The narrative reads and feels like an endless data stream, underscoring Self's deliberate attempt to bury the reader in an avalanche of information. A sardonic end to Self's modernist trilogy." - Library Journal
"[T]he hefty stream-of-consciousness conclusion to Self's ambitious trilogy ... 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." - Publishers Weekly
"A multilayered, multivocal, and long-awaited pleasure for the Self-absorbed." - Kirkus
"There are marvels in store ... Self's technique matches high seriousness with, at times, positively childish joking - which is quite in keeping with the dissonance and incongruity that he seeks to restore to his literary account of the psyche." - Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"Self's modernist trilogy concludes with typical panache and wit ... Phone is the final installment in what has shown itself to be one of the most ambitious and important literary projects of the 21st century ... Self's message is a perennially important one, brilliantly expressed: only connect." - Guardian (UK)
"Will Self's Phone will be one of the most significant literary works of our century ... Over and above the intellectual sprezzatura of the work, there is, at its heart, an emotional core, a profound sense of grief." - New Statesman (UK)
"[S]taggeringly ambitious, frighteningly intelligent, ludicrous, and brilliant ... Reading the hundreds of unbroken pages of Phone demands a physical commitment, the literary equivalent of mountaineering. But after all that, the summit brings a kind of elation." - Daily Telegraph (UK)
"[Phone] delivers a hurricane of satire and suspense ... A novel of grand ideas, powered by a ravenous curiosity about the role of the technological revolution in our private and public woes." - Financial Times (UK)
"Looks a forbidding read, but after a few pages it's like slipping into a warm, fragrantly scented bath ... Self's modernist stream-of-consciousness style, a kaleidoscopic tour-de-force of cultural references and wordplay, becomes addictive and compelling. Not to be missed." - Daily Mail (UK)
"[A] great trilogy ... Eccentrically punctuated, with no paragraphs, [Phone] is a series of fast-paced, laugh-out-loud witty, disgusting and frequently well-observed scenes ... In our depressingly middlebrow intellectual climate, it is refreshing that at least one novelist is raising the bar." - London Evening Standard (UK)
"Self seems to have fixed his eyes once again on the far-distant horizon of literary immortality and raised himself to his full and proper height ... You'd have to be pretty bloody-minded and blinkered not to recognise that the books are radically funny raucous romps, understandable and enjoyable by just about anyone and everyone." - Prospect Magazine (UK)
This information about Phone was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Will Self is the author of many novels and books of nonfiction, including Great Apes; How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year; The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Shark; Phone; the memoir Will; and the essay collection Why Read. He lives in South London.
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