Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes

  • Will Self
Viking: 2008. 288 pp. £18.99 0670889970 9780670889976 | ISBN: 0-670-88997-0

We live, by and large, Panglossian lives, naively reading purpose into the world, and into ourselves. Confronted by our bodies, we wonder at their watch-like precision. Each part of us does something. A heart pumps blood. A skull shields the brain. Eyes see. Hands grip.

When we look at the liver, however, we see not a tool for living, but a living thing — and this is an uncomfortable proposition. The liver has a plethora of functions: storage of the carbohydrate glycogen, decomposition of red blood cells, production of blood plasma proteins, detoxification, bile production — and that's without even mentioning its regulatory abilities. It intimidates us by its efficient ubiquity.

Will Self's new book, Liver, is not body horror in the science-fiction sense. For Self, as aficionados of the author will expect, Liver is satire. In his vision, our livers are more valuable than we are, more able, more alive. The liver is the only internal organ in the body that can regenerate itself to a significant extent. Yet still we contrive, over the course of our lives, to squander its magnificent estate.

The four 'lobes' of Self's book are individual stories — his strongest in years. With a little intertwining of narrative, his peculiar tales of abuse, disease and decay largely follow their own paths. Cirrhosis, cancer, hepatitis and, with a nod to Greek mythology, a vulture wander among the human protagonists as equals. Self's satire is classical rather than radical, rooted more in Alexander Pope than Jonathan Swift. Diseased flesh takes plenty of collateral damage, but contemporary behaviour is Self's real target. “Confronted with the nobility of feeling, high culture and deep spirituality”, Self — like the malevolent bar fly of his first story, 'Foie Humain' — “sees nothing but the stereotypic behaviours of anthropoid geese.”

Satire depends for its success on a pitiless accuracy. Self's prose veers between the appetizing and the nauseating, yet it is almost always on the nail: proof that the more accurately you describe a thing, the more surreal it seems. His vivid characters include a cancer sufferer being hustled towards her elective suicide by her daughter's poor timekeeping, the determined alcoholic gorging of a hapless barman, and a dangerously unmotivated Harley Street hepatologist. These sketches portray either the poetry of alienation or the 20/20 insight one acquires in the face of approaching death.

Self plays both sides, nowhere more affectingly than in the collection's magnificent centrepiece, 'Leberknödel' (Liver Dumplings). Joyce, a retired hospital administrator, knew that her cancers would not stop “until they had toppled the sovereignty of consciousness itself, and replaced it with their own screaming masses of cancerous tissue”. Appalled at the 'bad habit' of terminal decline, she arranges her own death. Seemingly reprieved, she finds, however, that her living has become as much of a bad habit as her dying. She looks objectively at her life — her world, her friends, her sot of a daughter — and realizes she has lost the empathic ability that gave her life its meaning. She has, essentially, already killed herself.

Self is not a writer who worries about the long-term value of his art, as that would distract him from the ephemera so essential to it. But 'Leberknödel' may be an exception. There's an eye to posterity in his playful nod to Gustave Flaubert's sardonic prose technique, gleefully italicizing every cliché passing through Joyce's dying mind. Like Madame Bovary, 'Leberknödel' mixes its scorn with warmth and sympathy. As a result, one gets a sense of the author's moral authority. Our bodies are not ours; nor are our feelings. We think our perceptions are ephemeral, but they are rooted in a physics that will outlast us. Joyce manages to argue herself away, destroyed by her own strength of purpose. This vision of humanity — too strong for itself, too clever by far — is more tragic than satirical.

For Self to kick the chair out from under himself in this way, turning his trademark scorn to tears of sympathy, is an achievement. Liver's grotesques are not meant to hold — but Joyce endures.