Story: iAnna
Author: Will Self
Collection: Guardian 9/11 Stories
I'll be honest with you, I am suffering from 9/11 Anniversary Fatigue. You cannot switch on the TV or radio, open a newspaper, or fire up a website without some piece 'commemorating' ten years since some religious nutjobs flew planes into public buildings. Horrible, horrible stuff at the time and not much less so now.
And I have no issue with people involved, or those affected by it, whether directly or indirectly, chosing to mark the fact that a round number of years have passed since it happened. If it helps them in some way then why not? What I find, well, almost obscene, is the huge media circus around this anniversary. I dread to think how many television and radio presenters are chalking up big expense bills on their American trips so that they can look sombre on camera within spitting distance of the places where lots of people died, or how many columnists and writers are making a few quid with themed articles and stories.
This is not some holier than thou thing, these people have a job to do, I just question whether we aren't perhaps going a tiny bit OTT with the whole thing. I have done my best to avoid as much of it as possible but what I have seen has all pretty much been the same - glum presenter speaks to survivor/eye witness/relative of someone who died; political journo questions how the world has changed since then; and acclaimed novelists write short stories for newspapers.
Which probably makes me a massive hypocrite for reading and reviewing one of those stories now. The Guardian has been running a series of stories on a 9/11 theme (presumably because there wasn't time to pull together a compilation album by middle-class singer-songwriters) and yesterday's was by Will Self. I read it just now when I realised that I hadn't posted my daily review and wanted to find something free and online to fill my quota.
And I have two positive things to report.
One: Will doesn't spend too much of the story up his own arse.
Two: It isn't actually about 9/11.
A retired psychiatrist is invited to observe an unusual patient. Anna seems to think that the outside world is an iPad. She pinches, enlarges, opens sidebars on the things around her. It is a neat idea and Self offers a simple and ingenious cure. OK, so he does his usual wanky thing of chucking in loads of long words that no one actually uses in real life - I am convinced some of the words he uses have only ever appeared in Will Self stories and novels - but I managed to ignore them, in the main.
No idea what it has to do with 9/11, although I am not complaining. First piece of fiction by Will Self that I have managed to finish in well over a decade.
Rating: ****
, has recently been reissued, as have her first two novels, 
and 
.
