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In Will Self’s 1991 debut collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity, an art therapist named Misha Gurney finds himself involuntarily sectioned in the psychiatric hospital where he is employed. In the title story, Misha’s father is revealed as a friend and early associate of the hospital’s chief psychiatrist Zack Busner, a recurring character in Self’s fiction until the present day.
In his first incarnation, Busner is engaged in testing the titular theory, by whose metric “the surface of the collective psyche was like the worn, stripy ticking of an old mattress. If you punched into its coiled hide at any point, another part would spring up – there was no action without reaction, no laughter without tears, no normality without its pissing accompanist.”
Outlandish? Maybe not. However plausible or implausible the theory itself, The Quantity Theory of Insanity was an enthralling work, the announcement of a talent that has continued to reinvent the concept of narrative fiction even as it gloomily advertises its demise. Thirty-five years on, Self augments his earlier hypothesis with The Quantity Theory of Morality, in which Zack Busner – now in his dotage – proffers the warning that there is only so much good to go around. “I estimate that when a social group’s morality quotient begins to decline, a sequel of bad behaviour will inevitably be bad feeling, as well.” Juries, jewellers, the Jews – no matter the size or derivation of the group in question, the new theory applies to all.
The novel opens on a Hampstead dinner party. One of the guests is Will, a writer who knows the assembled company as only their creator could. Johnny Freedman is regaling everyone with his scheme to farm vicuña in the Aylesbury Hundreds; Cathy McCluskey is worried that her husband might be having an affair; Phil Szabo is mixing cocktails. Phil is rumoured to be some sort of spy, but Will is quick to dismiss him as a Foreign Office functionary. “I’d always thought of Phil as a sort of minor character, not of any real significance, merely there to make up the numbers.” As for Will himself, “although ostensibly the narrator, and so omniscient within this tale masquerading as a life – I was undoubtedly the most minor of all. After all, what did anyone know about me, besides the fact that I painted in watercolours, had a studio conversion and consorted with these cyphers?”
The Quantity Theory of Morality contains multitudes, including multiple iterations of itself. Through each of the novel’s five parts, a similar scenario repeats itself: the dinner party, the opera at Glyndebourne, the New Year’s gathering in Dorset, the holiday in La Spezia, the disastrous funeral. These set pieces play out in similar fashion, up to and including word-for-word repetition of certain lines of dialogue, though their points of view are different and the characteristics of the participants peculiarly fluid: in one, all the characters are male, and tagged with their penis size. In the next, they are all female: “Willa” is now a writer of erotic fiction, and it’s Phillipa Szabo mixing the mojitos.
With each new iteration comes a ratcheting up of tension and an underhum of violence that is unmistakably Ballardian. “I’m fairly confident when I say one of you is going to die,” Busner warns, “and die due to the moral dereliction of the group as a whole.” He wants Bettina Haussmann – who holds a high-up position in a Swiss bank – to use her employers’ new semi-sentient data-modelling technology to predict the moment of maximum danger, but when Bettina flies back from work in Zurich, she discovers that Britain as it was no longer exists. The new Home Office Visitor Inspection Service (HOVIS) has replaced the old Border Inspection Force and their theme tune (the slow movement of Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, of course) is playing over the sound system in the airport. Bettina is told to report to Balls Pond Road with all the other Jews. Poundbury is the new Theresienstadt. The Nationalist Trust has taken over and Busner has killed himself in despair. His predictions have come to pass. The morality quotient has dipped to a level where the official sign-off on government documents is Perish the Jews.
The Quantity Theory of Morality is a raucously political novel. There’s everything in here: trans rights, green issues, the Holocaust, the Gaza conflict, the general moral turpitude of the neoliberal elite. But Self is too good a writer to ever be preachy. The novel is excoriating about our current slide towards the abyss; that doom’s trajectory can be so entertaining is down to Self’s central preoccupation with language and with fictionality.
More even than Martin Amis, Self reads like early Nabokov: barbed, provocative, virtuosic in his performance of linguistic jokes. Though The Quantity Theory of Morality might be characterised as a wickedly knowing send-up of the Hampstead novel, there is pathos here too. The book’s long, elegiac coda makes direct reference to Self’s own perilous health condition: “Will had been ill for a long time before he died. I wasn’t sure altogether how long – but at least a decade. He’d had a blood disorder which eventually mutated into the inevitable cancer.”
We can only hope that this rollicking, unsettling and furiously intelligent work is not meant as a valediction, though it is proof enough of Self’s Nabokovian certainty that art is the thing. That, and his home city London, the enduring material facts of place and time: “I lend my greatest credence of all to that smell, a synthesis of a sepia tone, with the taint of damp flannel, and the stench of singed rubber, and the desiccation of antediluvian soot, and the Googleplex glimpses of a million, billion cigarettes” – the inimitable savour of the underground at Hampstead tube.
