Unfortunately wasn't for me, but thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for allowing me to read this title.

Advanced Reader copy - Enjoyed this book, really opened my eyes and made me seek out other similar books to read.

I really want to like this as I love Self's journalism and I enjoyed Umbrella... but I just couldn't warm to it. Too rambling for me, too disorganised and I found I didn't care what happened. I rarely give up on a book but I gave up on this one.

I was given a copy of the book by Netgalley in return for an honest review.

Mr Self is as creative, philosophical and wearily sarcastic as ever. The man is a genius.

I enjoyed Phone. It is long, rather rambling and disjointed and full of distinctive style, all of which I would expect to combine to make me very grumpy, but it's very well done and I was surprised to find myself pleasurably immersed in it.

Phone is by turns funny, touching and full of sharp social observation. It's about…er…well, aspects of modern life, really. There are interweaving strands and we jump between stories and time periods. There is never any indication of the jumps, which happen in the middle of a paragraph, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, I think – you just become aware that suddenly he's talking about someone else in a different place and time. It sounds like the sort of tricksy, show-offy writing which generally puts me right off, but I found Will Self's style and his portraits of the minds of his protagonists so involving that I didn't mind that much. In particular, his depiction of a fine mind decaying into dementia is exceptionally good, I think, and he makes shrewd and witty comments on aspects of how we live now, too.

Some examples of Self's style may help to illustrate what I mean. This, about the workings of the mental health system, "..he'd passed all the required tests, and eventually gained a full-time position as a clinical depressive," or a description of nurse which I found witty and apposite, "..a hatchet-faced woman who wouldn't now what tenderness was…if you beat it into them with a meat tenderiser." Or this musing of the former psychologist succumbing to dementia, "…my brain is being choked in a convolvulus of neurofibrillary tangles…" If you like those, you'll probably like the book; if you don't, you won't.

I do like them, and although 600-odd pages at a stretch was too much for me and I had to take a few breaks and come back to it, I thought Phone was an engaging and rewarding read. Recommended.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

I really hated this book. The style was extremely annoying and the plot did not draw me in. I couldn't finish it. In fact I hardly started it before giving up. I have loved some Will Self books and hated some so it was always going to be hit or miss.

Look, I really did try to like Phone. I loved Umbrella, and Shark was on just the right side of OK. But Phone seems to be the same book told all over again, just without the plot. I gave up at a quarter of the way through.

Phone opens with Zack Busner, former psychiatrist, wandering around a hotel in Manchester with his undercarriage out. It seems he has dementia. The narrative – a third person stream of consciousness devoid of paragraphing – slips from the present situation into long (and I mean long) reminiscences/fantasies – never quite sure which. These reminiscences are sordid and salacious – drugs, prostitution, spies hanging around gay bars, unhappy families. They are also hopelessly disjointed, repetitive and don’t go anywhere.

This style was exciting in Umbrella where there was a unifying theme – the treatment of encephalitis lethargica. Umbrella had frequent social and cultural references to the 1960s and 1970s; it had wit and it had panache. Shark was a bit more of the same, but lacking a cogent story at its heart. But this, Phone, just has nothing to hold it together or hold the reader’s interest. It doesn’t have witty cultural references, it doesn’t have any obvious political statement to make. It doesn’t even have the novelty of an idiosyncratic narration since it has already been done twice before.

Phone is a step too far, still riding on Umbrella’s coat tails. We know Will Self has done highly original stuff – but is he like the Zack Busner of this text – a faded shadow of a once great man?

This is a demanding read and being brutally honest I'm not convinced I'd have persevered without the need to give a review. It was my first Will Self book and is about Jonathan De'Ath (not so subtle naming) and the secrets within his phone. It does reflect on the overwhelming presence of phones in our lives, and also on contemporary issues, like conflict and war in the Middle East and within families and the total scrutiny of our lives that engaging with technology allows. The phone is both a blessing and a curse.

I honestly found this damn near impossible to read. I love Will Self, and am aware that his last few books have been very stream-of-consciousness-y, but couple that with reading an uncorrected proof makes it ten times worse. I'll definetly read it when it comes out (although I think, given its format, that I'll try the audiobook instead), especially since it's Self's first queer book since Dorian.

Phone is the witty and fast paced new novel from Will Self, a side-eyed look at the modern worlds of intelligence, warfare, and technology. The main focus is on Jonathan De’Ath, a spy known as ‘The Butcher’ to all who and know him, and his secret longterm lover, tank commander Gawain Thomas. The other thread of the narrative follows the recurring Self character Zach Busner, an aging psychiatrist, and his family, particularly his daughter-in-law Camilla and autistic grandson Ben. Self creates a riot of a ride, darkly comic and reference-heavy, in this novel about technology and life in the twenty first century.

The narrative hurtles full throttle in one direction, narrated by one character without room for pause, then screeches suddenly into a new point of view. This style - not unexpected to anyone aware of Self’s work - is unlikely to be to everyone’s taste, but it creates an obsessively-echoing and detailed novel full of parroting phrases and cultural references. Acronyms are written phonetically, making the proliferation of them in the modern day very apparent. The Butcher is a fantastic creation, a meticulous and twisted spook who ends up with a glaringly obvious Achilles’ heel, and his sections make for the most exciting reading. How his story has any connection to Busner, Camilla, and Ben is not apparent for much of the novel, but becomes apparent by the end in a satisfyingly fitting yet somewhat ambiguous way.

Phone will not appeal to everybody. However, its blend of exposing military and intelligence cover-ups, political and societal satire, dark comedy, and strangely intriguing characters is a success, leaving a novel that is an intense and unrelenting read, one that pulls the reader into its style and idiosyncrasies. Despite being a spook adept at hiding, Jonathan De’Ath is not easy to forget.

(Note: this review will be posted on my blog Fiendfully Reading and on Goodreads closer to the publication date.)