I didn't know what to expect when I began reading the first story in the collection, "The North London Book of the Dead", but it didn't take long for the charms of Self's writing to make themselves apparent. His style is laconic, conversational, even insouciant, and laden with quirky and evocative (albeit not always particularly subtle) imagery (in the opening paragraph: "Cancer tore through her body as if it were late for an important meeting with a lot of other successful diseases") and his subject could perhaps be summarised as 'the bizarre/everyday (= insanity)'.
These stories are rather black, often funny, and really quite strange: an anthropologist devotes himself to the study of an Amazon tribe notable for its banality and boringness; a hitherto only moderately successful academic has the stunning insight that the overall level of sanity in the world is stable, so that an increase in sanity in any given grouping must cause a decrease elsewhere (an thesis which proves to be empirically provable, leading to much craziness, so to speak); and, in that first story, it turns out that everyone in London who dies is simply then relocated to a different part of the city, where they continue their existence amongst the community of the dead (who are, in all other respects, as remarkably dull and sedate as the living)...
The strangeness, though, is the filter through which Self views modern society, and it renders trenchant his implicit social commentary (insanity is a recurring theme - apart from the title story, it's central to two of the other pieces in the collection). Although I don't get the sense that there's really any kind of program to Self's critique - his purpose is to hold a mirror up to modern existence as he sees it, rather than to advocate any positive alternative - the book is certainly satire, and effective satire at that.
I was rather taken, too, with some of the ideas running through the final story, "Waiting" (even though I thought that it was probably one of the weaker pieces of writing in the collection), in particular (from a speech delivered by a character who is peripheral in a narrative sense but thematically central):
To sum up: The existence of the possibility of the destruction of the world by men themselves, in a number of different forms - nuclear war, ecological disaster, man-made pandemics - means that although in a sense we live in a time that is more acutely aware than ever before of the possibility of some form of the Apocalypse, nonetheless that Apocalypse is no longer in any sense evidence of the immanent; it is merely imminent. In the past, the ending of an era, of even a century, was viewed with great fear and a spontaneous move towards salvation in one form of [sic] another, a move that can only be understood solidly in the context of the Judaeo-Christian cultural dialectic. The end of this current era will, I believe, be met with at worst indifference and at best with some quite good television retrospectives.
It's a suitable note on which to end this peculiar, rather brilliant collection of discontents.
