My idea of fun

Ian Wharton, the main character opens the story by giving the readers a graphic description of a horrific murder he may or may not have committed. He adds to this that he is sitting in his kitchen, waiting for dawn, at which time he will walk upstairs an rip apart his pregnant wife, rip out their unborn child or...
he will not.
He leaves it all up to the reader: "I'm all for audience participation." But first he wants to tell his story.

The story unfolds as a gripping phantasmagoria in which Will Self explores the absence of god that is filled in by Marketing. He succeeds in painting a heartbreaking and provocative representation of the human interior as occupied and vandalized by science and business.

One the most touching parts of the book are the scenes where in the main character relives, through his gift of eidetism, the pains and hardship of al the people involved in the manufacturing of an single piece of fabric, from the labourers in the egyptian cottonfields, the young girls whose bleeding hands stain cotton in the weaving mill to the illegal greek-cypriot immigrant who employs his fellow countrymen in the london sweat shops.

Food for thougt, indeed!

9/10