Will Self Can't Write

I am bitter and I am fierce. I would very much like to have a fight with the editorial team of The Guardian. Perhaps this is old age, frustration at my lack of literary success. Perhaps I am slowly relinquishing my attachment to the liberal icons of my youth.

I have just read Will Self's review of Mark Kermode's book. Now, complaining that Will Self's prose has too many long words is like castigating Facebook for too much Miley Cyrus. However, in reviewing Kermode's book - which is partially an advertisement for Self's new role on The Observer as film critic - I wondered whether The Guardian had finally decided to leave in the place-holder text.

Self has always been a nearly-man of British literature: he was nearly as cool a drug writer as Irvine Welsh, he was nearly a social satirist in the tradition of Martin Amis. Still, he was pretty funny that time he took drugs on John Major's campaign bus (or whatever vehicle it was). And he made a half-decent stab at being a sinister, arch alternative to the usual literati they wheel onto culture shows in the late 1990s.

However, this review is so pompous, so self-regarding that, had I read it in a play, I would have assumed it was another attempt by a playwright to represent mental illness - and whipped off an angry blog about how theatrical madness is an insult to sufferers of mental ill-health. It is as if The Guardian doesn't employ sub-editors.

And this is not a first offence. Russell Brand's piece on his wild night at the Awards Where He Called Hugo Boss out on Genocide had that same 'will this do?' stream of consciousness. Yet with Brand, it's possible to imagine him poncing about the stage in a big scarf and enunciating wryly: the monologue read badly, but Brand was probably thinking of the words as a future routine.

Self is supposed to be a writer, a critic, even. I kind of get offended when other artists think they know how to be a critic (even Andy Field, the man behind Forest Fringe, frustrates me when he turns his hand to reviews). Strike one for Self. Then there is the deliberate over-use of fancy words: the point of writing to make ideas become coherent, comprehensible, not hide them in wraiths of trickery: strike two. Then there is the ultimate simplicity of the content: Self is just saying he doesn't like the book. Strike Three.

Dreadful. Dreadful. Dreadful. Of course, I encourage The Guardian to keep it up. The quicker that they dissolve into debt and uselessness, the quicker the cockroaches on the blogs can survive and replace the monolithic bastions of establishment thought.

Other newspapers are available, and I would have a big fight with them, too. Except the Daily Mail, which just scares me.