Will Self: Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe

Reviewed by LINDA HERRICK

When we first meet Dr Shiva Mukti, he's munching sourly in the canteen at St Mungo's, a rundown NHS mental health hospital in London. The Brahmin-born psychiatrist — in his early 40s, seething with ill-will — is eating with his only friend, hinge-maker David Elmley.

Things are not good for Dr Mukti. He has come to the conclusion that therapy is useless and the only treatment for mental illness is medication, plenty of it. He regrets the lack of opportunity in today's mental health field, where there are no longer openings for breakthroughs — only breakdowns.

He most bitterly despises pompous senior consultant Zack Busner — whom Self fans met in his first novel, The Quantity Theory of Insanity — and pointedly snubs him at a conference. There will be consequences.

Soon, Busner starts sending Mukti patients he claims to be unable to diagnose or treat. Rightly suspicious, Mukti in turn sends patients to Busner. The doctors have turned their patients into human weapons. Paranoia mounts.

Meanwhile, at home in Kenton Park Cres, Mukti is displaced by a diaspora of relatives — gummy aunties and uncles — and his fragrant wife Swati is barely aware of his presence. Or so he thinks, but over time Swati has become quite the skilled psychiatrist herself through close observation of her husband.

As the duel intensifies between the two medics, Elmley is enlisted, and a devilish masterstroke is played in the form of a pallid young lady, Darlene, who seems to be having all her blood drained. Mukti is determined to get to the bottom of this mystery, and he does.

The implications of the horrific climax of Mukti's investigations reverberate long after the book is closed, and to me, a long-time Self fan disappointed by his recent Dorian, that indicates he is back in form. No one describes the decay of urban life more acutely, and he's even more accomplished when it comes to paralleling the disintegration of the streets to the displacement within.

So, in the short story 161, a youth takes refuge from his would-be killers in one of the only remaining occupied flats in a putrid tower block. He hides in a room so crowded with the detritus of an old life, he gets away with being unnoticed for days. It's an ingenious tale, Self's prose cracking like a whip; the outcome surprisingly tender and humane.

In The Five-Swing Walk, a weekend father has bad dreams about his child, then awakes to the real nightmare of having to struggle to the park with his estranged children and new baby. As he heads for the park, four toddlers in tow, Misfortune — portrayed by Self as a real entity — hitches a ride. The scene is desolate, and Dad is full of self-pity. He will have plenty to cry about shortly.

Conversations With Ord is less successful, as two friends stroll listlessly along Battersea embankment, playing a dialogue game where they acquire different characters. It doesn't feel real, more a throwaway showcase for Self's awesome vocabulary.

Return to the Planet of the Humans sees Self return to a continuing preoccupation with sanity, identity and a certainty that life in another skin is more desirable. It's a slight but unsettling tale.

Self's fiction occupies a place we would probably not want to visit. The trouble is, we may already be there. Sometimes we just need someone to point it out, and that's what makes Self so funny, disturbing and absorbing. Self-absorbing, if you like.

* Bloomsbury, $55