Raindrops Keep Falling on Their Heads: Will Self’s Modernist Experiment, Umbrella
Zack Busner, the naïve neurologist in Will Self’s new novel, Umbrella (Grove Press, 448 pp., $25), thinks he can use the drug L-Dopa to cure a disease called Encephalitis lethargica. It last broke out during World War I, and its sufferers have been catatonic for 50 years, but Busner predicts “miraculous” results. “In the upper storeys of these rundown minds,” he thinks, “true sentience remains.” This hunch is vindicated when the “enkies” wake up to the ’70s and start displaying Edwardian attitudes. Audrey Death, the liveliest enkie, calls her Kenyan nurse “the blackie.” Unfamiliarity induces raptures as well as racism—another woman spends whole days being amazed by a light switch. A novelist might envy the enkies’ responsiveness to life, like a Martian’s or an infant’s in its rawness. Yet there’s a witty scene in which Busner corrals “his guinea pigs” for an outing to a church. As cultural tourists, they fall into the usual clichés of curiosity, unconsciously parodying their awe at the new world by faking it for the old one: “they stop to marvel at the enormous organ, with its three-storey-high pipes.”
Umbrella is a novel that ceaselessly contrasts real wonder with sham versions. Even encephalitis is like this, a travesty of regard for the basic propositions of being human. A risen enkie recalls his catatonic inner life as a run-on sentence of hysterical repetitiveness: “a dreadful copybook sort of arithmetic … I am what I am what I am.” Umbrella spans a century but repeats its themes. When Stanley Death, a soldier, sends telegrams to his sister Audrey from the Battle of the Somme, all that they say is “I am.” Read More
