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内容説明
Shiva Mukti is a hardworking and conscientious psychiatrist, who, in the inauspicious surroundings of St Mungo's - a central London hospital of more than average decrepitude - does his level best to staunch the flow of mental illness. But Mukti is not a happy man, beset by thwarted ambition and sexual frustration, he now finds himself in thrall to the more successful and urbane Dr Zack Busner, consultant psychiatrist at Heath Hospital, and an originator of the once modish Quantity Theory of Insanity. Why is it that Busner seems so intent on fostering a professional relationship with Mukti? Is it his way of putting his junior colleague in his place? Or is Busner - as Mukti begins to suspect - a member of a sinister cabal? And what about the schizophrenic patients Busner refers to Mukti for his opinion, are they merely sick people, or in fact human weapons in a bizarre psychological duel?
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Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe is Will Self's third collection of stories. (The "other" in the title being four tales of woe or woeful tales, as the ungenerous may be inclined to dub them.) Self's visceral, urban fictions have long been described as Swiftian. They are grotesque, scatological and, like Swift, rely on absurd premises being taken to their absurd yet logical conclusions. Dr Mukti, a novella that resurrects Dr Busner from The Quantity Theory of Insanity, certainly conforms to type.
It's a tale that depicts a battle between two rival psychiatrists: Dr Shiva Mukti of St Mungo's in Fitzrovia, an Indian "of modest achievement but vaulting ambitions" (ambitions he is convinced are being thwarted by a "crypto-psycho-Semitic" cabal) and the Jewish Dr Zack Busner, father of the Quantity Theory of Insanity and consultant at Heath Hospital. Their weapons, missiles really, are damaged patients that they fire back and forth across the Hampstead Road in a dual for supremacy. Busner sends "Creosote Man", a schizoid "with a mission to bring creosote ideas to the rest of mankind" to Mukti for a second opinion. Mukti counters with Rocky, a "Humanoid time bomb with a frontal-lobe lesion" and dreadlocks that gush "from his high forehead like jets of gingerish flocculent water". And so it goes on until Darlene Davis, an anorexic Goth with "a haemoglobin level of six", turns up at St Mungo's. From hereon in things go from bad, to very, very much worse for the Mukti.
London's topography, or a grisly hallucinatory version of it, is etched in lurid detail, the doctors' ambits echoing their contrasts in status. Mukti, his neurosis, his home life and the Hindu community in London's north-western suburbs are observed with acuity. But Self's self-conscious style--the profusion of extraneous similes, metaphors and his recondite vocabulary--is draining to say the least; mouths are "pink baskets", cabbage is "craven" and even a lowly potato is "pusillanimous". Self aficionados, and those who relish seeing words such as "flocculent" liberated from the mustier nooks of the dictionary, won't fail to be delighted. --Travis Elborough --このテキストは、 ハードカバー 版に関連付けられています。
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Weird Self
2007/11/18
形式:ペーパーバック
Will Self is sui generis, there is no one like him. He has plied his weird, surrealist trade in fiction and journalism for a while now, but I think this book tops his others in the bizarre stakes. Personally, I didn't think it was as good as his three previous short story collections: The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Grey Area and Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys.
About half the book is taken up with the title story which pits Hindu against Jew, junior against senior psychiatrist who send each other deranged patients under the auspices of requesting a second opinion. Mukti, jealous and angry at the ludicrous, arrogant tele-psychiatrist Busner, becomes convinced that he is being controlled by a cabal of psychiatrists, led by Busner, determined to undermine him. All sinews of sanity are unravelled by the end of the story.
After that there is a mixed bag of short stories. 161 is written in the shadow of Ballard, the grey area of a tower block in Liverpool. A pensioner befriends a youth, threatened by gang men, and despite seeming to be a vulnerable incontinent old man, he keeps his real intentions close to his chest. The story, as revealed in the acknowledgements, was commissioned as part of a Liverpool Housing project. Self actually wrote the piece from a Liverpool tower that was about to be demolished which reveals an interesting desire on behalf of the author to fuse his work with the real world in interesting and original ways.
The Five-Swing Walk, set amongst the scrubby park areas of South London is a bleak, dark meditation on fatherhood. A weekend visiting rights father takes his son to the swings, and becomes disturbed by the nightmarish responsibilities of his role. This is the darkest piece of the lot.
Cheer yourself up somewhat with Conversations with Ord about two lonely middle aged men who conduct a friendship based on visceral hatred and imaginative conceits - mental games of Go-Chess, and pretending to be Ord, a general in his 80s. They discuss the notion of going up in a hot air balloon, stationed over Vauxhall Bridge.
The final piece, Return to the Planet of the Humans, is little more than a coda to Self's earlier novel, Great Apes.
About half the book is taken up with the title story which pits Hindu against Jew, junior against senior psychiatrist who send each other deranged patients under the auspices of requesting a second opinion. Mukti, jealous and angry at the ludicrous, arrogant tele-psychiatrist Busner, becomes convinced that he is being controlled by a cabal of psychiatrists, led by Busner, determined to undermine him. All sinews of sanity are unravelled by the end of the story.
After that there is a mixed bag of short stories. 161 is written in the shadow of Ballard, the grey area of a tower block in Liverpool. A pensioner befriends a youth, threatened by gang men, and despite seeming to be a vulnerable incontinent old man, he keeps his real intentions close to his chest. The story, as revealed in the acknowledgements, was commissioned as part of a Liverpool Housing project. Self actually wrote the piece from a Liverpool tower that was about to be demolished which reveals an interesting desire on behalf of the author to fuse his work with the real world in interesting and original ways.
The Five-Swing Walk, set amongst the scrubby park areas of South London is a bleak, dark meditation on fatherhood. A weekend visiting rights father takes his son to the swings, and becomes disturbed by the nightmarish responsibilities of his role. This is the darkest piece of the lot.
Cheer yourself up somewhat with Conversations with Ord about two lonely middle aged men who conduct a friendship based on visceral hatred and imaginative conceits - mental games of Go-Chess, and pretending to be Ord, a general in his 80s. They discuss the notion of going up in a hot air balloon, stationed over Vauxhall Bridge.
The final piece, Return to the Planet of the Humans, is little more than a coda to Self's earlier novel, Great Apes.
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