This was an enjoyable read and I would recommend it. thanks for letting me have an advance copy. I'm new to this author.

Another zany but wonderful tome from Will Self. After Umbrella and Shark, the third in the trilogy is in many ways the most bizarre and brilliant. Not for everyone, it takes time and energy to focus on reading in Self's inimitable style where even abbreviations are phonetically written out. Well worth it though.

Initially I was drawn to this by its simplistic cover and title; its actually the third in a trilogy which I didn't realise it but a quick google suggested that not having read the previous books wouldn't be a massive issue; having finished it I'd agree in that you get quite a lot of character introduction and backstory in this book, perhaps people who've read the previous two may get more out of it but I didn't feel like I was missing out.

The layout is like nothing I've ever read before, essentially this is a 620 pages of continuous text; no paragraphs, no chapters - nothing. After ten minutes of reading I was fairly adamant I wouldn't be able to finish it but I actually pleasantly surprised as one of the benefits of the continuous-ness is that when I actually have time to read without distraction or the need of a 'I'll go until the end of the chapter' stopping point I actually found it quite easy to get lost in.

There's very little structure to the book, it rambles and tangents in all sorts of directions; Phone resolves around a handful of main characters, Dr Zack Busden, who's technology savvy, autistic grandson Ben has set him up with a new mobile which he's been firmly instructed not to lose; Ben's mother Camilla who finds herself stuck between her son and her schizophrenic husband relying on the support of her unusual father-in-law. MI6's Johnathan 'The Butcher' De'Ath and Gawain Thomas, army Colonel who is continuing to try and hide his long-term affair with Jonathan from his wife, three children and the rest of the army. Through these characters there are some fairly serious themes explored, obviously a main one is technology and how having mobile phones has both positively and negatively impacted our lives and how dependent we've become upon them. Others include, autism, dementia, paranoia, sexuality, war just to name a few.

This isn't a book I would generally recommend unless I knew someone well enough to judge whether they would a) get it or b) have the patience to get into it properly. After quite a bit of deliberation, I gave this 3 stars but I am glad I've read it as a bit of a personal challenge in trying something completely different.

Will Self’s eleventh novel Phone is the final installment of the trilogy that begun with Umbrella and Shark, following the life of psychiatrist Zack Busner. Phone is most decidedly a “modernist stream of consciousness” novel like it’s earlier counterparts, but it must be said that someone new to Self’s narrative technique might find themselves a tad flummoxed when reading the opening paragraph:

… …! and again… …! two groups of four… …! on it goes… …1 insistently persistently… …! not that one hears it quite so much nowadays… …! If one does it’s a fake – a recording of an old phone… …! done with a lot of echo… …! so’s to suggest it’s ringing in a largish, darkish hall… …!

When I first read this on my Kindle app, I truly believed I had received a damaged file, one with a demented amount of exclamation points. I quickly emailed the publicity team at Grove Atlantic to request a hardcover because my e-galley was no good. I even sent a screenshot upon request, only to receive the embarrassing reply that this was indeed the format of the novel, and that the exclamation points would go away after a few pages.

It’s not a stretch to imagine that quite a few laughs were shared at my expense. But moving on.

Psychiatrist Zach Busner, whom we already met in Self’s previous novels, is now in the age of smart phones and social media, suffering from increasing dementia. His professional life guards secrets related to LSD experimentation with patients suffering from PTSD. Now, Busner finds himself increasingly lost in his retreating memories with only a phone gifted to him by his autistic grandson, Ben. Busner’s children are also in a tug-of-war over declaring him mentally unfit and eventually confined to a nursing home which Busner cannot possibly fathom as the way his life is going to end.

Parallel to Busner’s, is the story of Jonathan De’Ath known as “The Butcher,” an MI6 operative whose secret life is a mystery to everyone from his mother to his various lovers. There is only one person who perhaps knows the true face behind The Butcher, and that is his longtime lover, Colonel Gawain Thomas, a married man with children who keeps his true self under a tight lid, including the biggest secret of all, a passionate sexual and emotional relationship with a man.

The element that connects Busner and The Butcher is the eventual fading of the control they have always exerted over their lives and the people around them. Through lack of dialogue, Self makes their thoughts interconnected, to the point where it’s almost impossible to discern where Busner begins and The Butcher ends.

But it isn’t just their narrative we are privy to because Self incorporates in the sticky mess of private reflections the points of view of Ben, Busner’s grandson, his daughter-in-law, and one of his sons. Jonathan’s married lover also interrupts the story with musings of his own.

If you believe this story sounds disastrous, in a way you’re right. It’s difficult to keep track of when Self changes POV’s and we’re listening to a different character, making it exhausting to keep up, not to mention the lack of empathy and charisma of either Busner or The Butcher. It can’t certainly be read as a standalone, since it’s already challenging to follow the plot even if you previously read the other two novels in the trilogy.

Self’s stream of consciousness isn’t for example like Eimear McBride’s, whose novels A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians can be taxing in the their own right, but certainly not comprehensible. Phone is dense and thick, like fog that sticks to the skin and robs you of any visibility. This sense of heaviness makes it harder to like or even enjoy the book, but if one manages to power though, it becomes almost a requiem for a life, or in this case, the lives of two very different men and the people who surround them, not ever knowing who they truly are, but coming to terms with their imperfections and past sins.

Phone is only a good novel if one has the time to carefully mull over it and masticate it with care. If not, it just becomes one of those cumbersome rotary phones from the past, the ones with a screaming ring that many might want to ignore.

This was one of the oddest books that I have read. Unfortunately, I was not able to finish this bad boy, but I did get to around the 40% mark on my kindle. I simply was not able to get into the strangeness of the writing.

My thanks to netgalley and Grove Atlantic for this advanced readers copy.

3.5 stars for an engaging book with plot a little lose at parts

This novel is surely some kind of a joke. I was unable to finish reading this gibberish.
I note that there are favorable reviews in major publications. Hey, the author has no clothes!
Thanks,NetGalley, for the ARC.

I started this book three times, but didn't get far. It was not for me.

I tried several times to get into this book but I couldn't make it past 15%. I always feel terrible not finishing ARCs because I want to be able to give an honest review. I feel conflicted about this because I know people who love Will Self's other works but unfortunately this title was just not for me.

I didn't finish this book. I couldn't get through it. I found the story hard to follow and a bit too chaotic.

The language is inventive and compelling, funny and uniquely memorable. I wish I could do justice to Will Self's genius, but I can't so I won't try. If you enjoy out of the ordinary, maybe a little bit crazy, then this is for you. A traditional novel this is not!

Sorry but this just wasn't for me. The format was challenging, to say the least, especially for a kindle reader. The plot, what I could make of it, was not my cup of tea. Thanks for the ARC but I did not finish. I have not posted to Goodreads and will not post to amazon because others might enjoy this. He's obviously got.a market but I'm not it.

This is one of the strangest books I've ever read. Or should I say that I TRIED to read. I just couldn't get used to the format and style of writing with the pages long sentences that didn't seem to make a lot of sense.

There's something for everyone and I'm sure there will be people who love this book. Not me.

I feel weird and conflicted on making review for this one. It felt like I didn't really like the book, it didn't fully grabbed my heart yet after reading it, all 600+ pages of it, I can't say, I wasted my time because I didn't.

I haven't read any of Will Self's works and was even disappointed when I discovered this is the third in the series. But clearly, I read it anyway. Maybe it's the writing. Will Self is undeniably and undoubtedly a great writer.

Do you like theatrical plays?

Why am I asking this? Because I'm not overly fond of watching theatrical plays. I watch them though and everytime I watched one, I can always say who are the great actors who played or that if the writers and production staffs did a great job. Reading a Self's novel feels like that. I can say he did a good job, and that he is indeed a great writer, but his writing isn't just for me. I can give a high rating but that doesn't necessarily mean I liked it.

You get what I mean?

The plot points he chose was... how do I put it? It was incredibly... comical? I don't mean this as an insult or in any bad way. You must understand I didn't read any of the previous books in this series and this is the first book I've read in this author. I was culture-shocked?Maybe because all the while, I was amused of what I'm reading. I mean, I don't know what I'm reading. I was like...uh..."I should be reading a dystopian YA right now" and then...oh... "I just can't put this down. i'll just read more.".

Look at that I just used Will Self's one way of writing... There were too much ellipsis. :) Too much song references. Yep I am very proud that I'm 25 and got those references :) :)

I think, no matter what I say, I can't deny the fact that I somehow enjoyed reading. Phone talks about many things and they're all interesting things. Autism, Dementia/ Alzheimer's, Homosexuality and even Iraq war. Oh and modern life and how we are living now. The title is incredibly creative and smart. *Round of applause*

Also, I was truly engaged in the character's lives and their stories. Self has his own way of doing that to the readers. Though it sometimes confused me as to who the narration is talking about or what and where it's talking about, I usually found myself emerged in reading sentence after sentence.

Phone, overall, is an engaging novel that might not be appealing at first yet can be amazing in the end. To be able to enjoy this, one must be in the right mood for reading especially that this is incredibly long. :)

I must admit that Will Self earned my respect and love. It's very obvious and I thinks he knows this, his writing style and this kind of books don't have much readers but he writes them anyway. I consider this real creativity and real love for writing.

I don't know that I can leave a positive or negative review. The formatting left this awkward and hard to read fully. Pity, I like Will Self quite a lot and was looking forward to this read.

A good finale to a great trilogy. With the exception of the final 100 pages where some of the dexterity of the narrative seems to collapse and the narrator becomes rather more expository, it is a properly fantastic bit of writing. It is also probably the most emotionally engaging of Will Self's novels.

This is the third novel in a trilogy comprised of Umbrella, Shark and thirdly, Phone.

This is not the easiest book to read, it's about 600 pages long without any chapters or breaks - it's effectively one paragraph. It's also quite challenging covering some dark subjects.

But don't let that put you off. It's an epic work of fiction, incredibly intelligently written in a non - linear style that weaves characters and threads together seamlessly, sometimes mid-sentence. The character development is excellent, you slowly learn about their complex natures as the story unfolds and some of this is not very pleasant.

The book starts at the point in time just before where it finishes. There are four principle characters - Dr Zach Busner, a retired psychiatrist; His grandson Ben; Jonathan De'Ath, an MI6 agent and his secret lover, Gawain Thomas, a soldier.

In some ways it's a love story between Jonathan and Gawain in the turbulent times of the early nineties / Iraq war; in others it's a story about the negative impact of technology on our state of mind. In others it captures the unraveling dysfunctionality inherent in all of us that seems to be a consequence of the modern era.

It did take me quite a bit longer than usual to read, partly because of the style which includes a lot of use of phonetic spelling, partly because of the disorienting way a storyline seamlessly blends from one character to another, partly because of the use of multiple voices for the same person and mostly because I needed to reread a lot of sections for all of these reasons.

It's definitely worth the effort though. It's a heady mix of enthralling, intelligent, challenging, funny and an often witty take on the state of humanity in modern times.

While this novel is not the sort of book I would normally go for, I found it quite absorbing with its distinctive writing style. Even though it was long it was an enjoyable read.

Good to have a readable, new Will Self. Parallel stories of the dysfuntional family of a retired psychiatrist receeding into dementia and the long affair between a soldier and a spy, defy your guesses of how the two stories wiill interact until the very end.. There is a strong theme of death, death of the mind, death of love and the deaths of real people. It is a compelling read.

Firstly I have to admit that this was a DNF for me.
I found the writing style far too difficult to read. It made it more of a chore than a pleasurable reading experience. I simply couldn't follow the disjointed stream of consciousness.
It's a shame, I felt like there was a good story hidden somewhere here but I couldn't decipher the language well enough to find out what it was.