My Idea of Fun: A Cautionary Tale

Will Self, the man who the Telegraph claims "could write his way out of a nuclear attack," is surely one of the most original and highly acclaimed writers to appear on the scene in the last decade. From Kafka to Cronenberg, Monty Python to Gore Vidal, the range of seemingly incongruous comparisons that have been made about Self serve as testimony to the literary establishment's grappling with what is a truly unique, wonderfully outrageous vision. My Idea of Fun is his long-awaited, extraordinary first novel.
The story of a devilishly clever international financier/marketing wizard and his young apprentice, My Idea of Fun is both a frighteningly dark subterranean exploration of capitalism run rampant and a wickedly sharp, technically acute display of linguistic pyrotechnics that glows with pure white-hot brilliance.
Ian Wharton is a very ordinary young man until he is taken under the wing of a gentleman known variously as Mr. Broadhurst, Samuel Northcliff, and finally and conclusively simply as the Fat Controller. Loud-mouthed, impeccably tailored, a fount of bombastic erudition, the Fat Controller initiates Ian into the dark secrets of his arts - of marketing, money, and the human psyche - and takes Ian, and the reader, on a wild voyage around the edges of reality.
As we careen into the twenty-first century, Self perfectly captures the zeitgeist of our times: money is the only common language; consumerism, violence, and psychosis (drug-induced and otherwise) prevail; and the human soul has become the ultimate product. The object of frenetic attention in Britain, where it has been both lauded and attacked, My Idea of Fun is, as one critic said, a "novel in sparkling inventive prose, that crackles with hell-fire."