Will Self takes the jumble of apparently random experiences that constitutes everyday life in the city - close encounters with photocopiers, with Bank Holiday traffic jams, with the cappucino drinking classes - and allows it to fester and mutate into a bizarre sci fi landscape punctuated by forbidding peaks of razor sharp literary satire. His wacky imaginative drive is reminiscent, at times, of the more sinister stories of Borges or Paul Bowles: though it would take a wackier imagination than mine to be able to visualise Borges devoting whole paragraphs of loving description to such subjects as, say, cancerous sputum or projectile vomit. Doesn't post modern life look dangerously, at times, like rubbish?
