Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys

Will Self's tabloid-friendly reputation as a connoisseur of proscribed substances should not obscure the fact that he can write many of his contemporaries under the table. Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, is filled with typically Selfish confections: gritty chunks of reality wrapped in a sweet shell of exquisitely funny and intelligent writing. Admittedly, some of the stories here feel a little underdeveloped, as if the author were flexing his literary muscles and showing how easily he can make highbrow style dirty-dance with his lowbrow obsessions, but even the least of them is a bravura performance by an expert wordsmith. Self's obvious pleasure in bringing his extraordinary talents to bear on the seamiest of subjects is irresistible: the description of a crack cocaine rush that closes the first story, for example, is quite possibly more intoxicating than the drug itself.

But the greater part of the book complements that dazzling style with deeper pleasures. As he ranges from the hilarious tale of a remarkable infant who babbles in business German ("Bemess-bemess-bemessungsgrundlage!") to a troubled psychiatrist's journey toward the abyss, Self shows an uncanny knack for mixing realism and absurdity. The closing piece, a short novella about a wrongly convicted sex offender's attempt to win a short-story prize, is the most assured of all. In this author's hands, the barely articulate conversations of career criminals are transformed into poetry, and the struggles of the central character are both moving and wickedly funny:

In prison, in the English winter, the word crepuscular acquires new resonance, new intensity. For here and now is an eternity of forty-watt bulbs, an Empty Quarter of linoleum and a lost world of distempered walls. It's an environment of corridors and walkways, a space that taunts with the idea of progression towards arrival; then delivers only a TV room full of modular plastic chairs and Styrofoam beakers napalmed by fag ends.

In Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys Will Self shows once again that he's someone to be reckoned with. The kind of writer a society needs, he uses his wit as a crowbar to pry open the cracks in our culture. --Simon Leake

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Surreality at it's best. - Rated
A wonderful journey into the dark, ironic and downright bizarre depths of society as it appears in the mind of the ingenious Will Self.

Brilliant - Rated
Will Self returns with another dazzling array of stories. He plays on the Swiftian ideas he explored in 'Great Apes', particularly in 'Caring, Sharing', a bizarre and brilliant story about humans being cared for by genetically engineered giants. His writing style is clever, ironic, savage and very amusing. I was entertained and enthralled throughout, though I agree that some of the stories are a lot more accomplished than others. The last one 'The Nonce Prize' was rather a let-down but overall the standard was very high.

An interesting (if mixed) bag - Rated
This was my first foray into Self's fictional work after previously reading his newspaper columns. The stories in this collection span quite a diverse range of subjects (insect/human equality, strange words from the mouths of babes, the drug find of all our dreams). That said, there is a recurrent theme of cars and their symbolic nature, as in the title piece and the story entitled "Design Faults in the Volvo 760". The descriptive prose in these and the concept of "man-machine symbiosis" are reminiscent of, and may even be a nod in the direction of, JG Ballard's "Crash". All in all, rather a curate's egg.

A Triumph of Self - Rated
There are two distinctive characteristics that make Will Self's writing what it is : his idiosyncratic prose and his outlandish concepts. The language Self uses can be off-putting. The prose is deliberately dense in places, almost as if it is put up as a challenge - Self has publicly derided lazy readers. But his verbosity cannot be dismissed as simple posturing - it is an intrinsic part of his style. The turns of phrase and intricate metaphors he uses in Tough, Tough Toys .. are frequently delightful. In terms of Self's bizarre, surreal concepts, the short story collection allows him to showcase more, if not taking them fully to conclusion. 'Dave Too' and 'A Story For Europe' are possibly the weak links here, with entertaining touches but a sense of incompleteness. The other stories are more forceful. The linked opening and closing stories, 'The Lump of Crack as Big as the Ritz' and 'The Nonce Prize', work strong characters and narrative around the idea of a mythical-sized lump of crack cocaine, while the title story is an intense and desperate tale of macho obsession. For me, it is 'Caring, Sharing' that provides the ultimate example of the vicious satire that gives Self his bite. By their nature, short story collections are often less satisfying than novels, but by the sheer imagination that Self possessess, Tough, Tough Toys.. does not disappoint.

funny but with a punch - Rated
This short story book is very varied from drug-dealing to silent babies back to drug-dealing and then to jail. Every story is wity with a normally funny strange ending, but all in all this book is good old entertaiment. A good holiday book!