Will Self's Umbrella is challenging but rewarding

I've read a few of Will Self's books (The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Great Apes, The Book of Dave) before, but never anything like his 2012 tour-de-force Umbrella.

It's a Modernist stream-of-consciousness masterpiece set in a mental asylum over a hundred years or so, and focussing largely on a particularly quirky long-time patient, Audrey De'Ath (or Death, or Deeth, or Dearth, or Deerth: it varies), and a staff psychiatrist, Zach Busner. Like a slightly-more-accessible Ulysses, there are few paragraphs, some idiosyncratic punctuation, and many long, obscure or colloquial words. Thoughts and descriptions unfold, and then are hijacked or distracted before they reach their conclusion. Vernacular slang and popular songs interrupt verbose flights of fancy. Technical medical and psychological descriptions merge with poignant literary minutiae. And all of it shifting seamlessly between the decades without any warning, sometimes seemingly in mid-sentence.

It's a wild cornucopia of clashing styles, often verging on poetry. But it works, and it's unputdownable.

Just a few short clips, to give a flavour of the riches contained:

On he comes ... and still the deep throat gapes in front of him, a gullet of light-stripes indented with bands of pockmarks - the original plasterers' decorative scheme - or else scattered with medallions and stone-rustic quotes seeped-upon-brown.

You'll be needing one, Busner, Whitcomb had said - a jolly arsehole, his long face a fraction: eyes divided by mustache into mouth - else the patients'll think ... Think what? Think what?!

In the submarine hospital all is agitation, the fin-flip along corridor after corridor after corridor, flowing in and out of recesses and embrasures, swirling around buttresses and foaming down the salmon run of the staircases, at the bottoms of which it dissolves in a spray of tics and jerks and grimaces.

So, a challenging but rewarding read. Curiously, though, it became less challenging as it progressed. I don't think this was just me getting used to his style, although there may have been an element of that too. It's almost like Mr. Self felt sorry for his readers, and thought he had punished them quite enough after the first however many pages. Or maybe he just found the initial style too exhausting. Certainly, the style seemed to change after the first 50 pages or so - still erudite and self-consciously literary, but less aggressively modernist and Joycean. It actually became more enjoyable as a result.