The Quantity Theory of Morality
A dystopian farce featuring rampant English fascists burning piles of e-readers, as well as a 'semi-sentient' organic AI octopus called Margaret ... Told in Self’s customary brand of companionable misanthropy where even the most innocuous sentence has the petulant timbre of a diatribe. His prose, with its languid digressions punctuated by intermittent bursts of wit, achieves the rare feat of being lively and sluggish at the same time ... There’s a lot going on here but in the midst of it all we can make out Self, 64, reckoning with his own quintessence as he enters his dotage.
A coruscating satire about a group of metropolitan sophisticates trapped in an endless round of backbiting, gossip, infidelity and self-loathing ... At the heart of The Quantity Theory of Morality is a lamentation about our collective ethical compass gone askew.
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The Quantity Theory of Morality contains multitudes, including multiple iterations of itself ... With each new iteration comes a ratcheting up of tension and an underhum of violence that is unmistakably Ballardian ... Raucously political ... Self reads like early Nabokov: barbed, provocative, virtuosic in his performance of linguistic jokes ... 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.
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