Visualized as a film, Will Self’s Umbrella is rather like a mix of Noveceto and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Umbrella is a piece of modernist fiction, and reads accordingly, but that shouldn’t frighten anybody away.
Despite being a little overwhelming with its abrupt change between narrators and from narrative into thought, it is so clearly and expertly expressed that it is a joy to read.
However, at times it feels as though the whole novel is tilting towards structural instability. The reader is submerged into a stream of consciousness: there are no chapter breaks at all, and the majority of the sentences are long, with odd pauses thrown in. However, Umbrella is no ramble. Rather it seeks to come across as far more chaotic than it is. Self is a man with a plan, and the stories of Audrey Death, a patient in an asylum and Dr. Zack Busner, her psychiatrist, interweave beautifully.
The book is a double biography spanning the course of the twentieth century: we see Audrey in childhood and as a young adult, then we have the middle and old age of Bus- ner, all in the context of Audrey’s crippling post-encephalitic condition of which Self writes expertly.
It is a stark reminder of the precariousness and fragility of human existence and perception. In his interweaving of existences, Self can showcase a century of life and change. His ability to paint the past so vividly through dialect, detail, and pop culture is amazing. He moves subtly from the Kinks’ ‘Ape-man’ to Sam Wood’s masterpiece of black and white cinema, King’s Row, and undoubtedly to many others that floated dreamily over my head.
This might be why Umbrella works. Although it doesn’t present the narrative in chronological order, it is so firmly anchored to, not a specific time, but a place: London. A strength of Self’s writing is that he breathes life into London, not just the London of our lifetime, but most fascinatingly, London when a cab was still pulled by a horse – London right on the cusp of the modern age.
There is a pleasing circularity to the composition, stressing at the same time the fact that on one level nothing ever really changes, and equally that when a place is revisited everything is different.
Finally, Umbrella makes you think, the highest praise that I can give it.
