The Quantitative Theory of Morality by Will Self – A raucous, innovative satire on the state of the nation | Self will

IIn Will Self’s 1991 debut collection The Quantity Theory of Madness, an art therapist named Mischa Gorny finds himself involuntarily sectioned in the psychiatric hospital where he works. In the title story, Mischa’s father is revealed to be a friend and early assistant of the hospital’s chief psychiatrist, Zach Posner, and is a recurring character in autofiction to this day.

In his first incarnation, Posner was engaged in testing the titular theory, according to which “the surface of the collective psyche was like the tattered striped beats of an old mattress. If you pierced its warped skin at any moment, another part would emerge – there was no action without reaction, no laughter without tears, no normal life without the accompaniment of urination.”

strange? Maybe not. However plausible or implausible the theory itself may be, The Quantitative Theory of Madness was a captivating work, a declaration of a talent that continued to reinvent the concept of narrative fiction even as it gloomily announced its own demise. Thirty-five years later, Self reinforces his earlier hypothesis with the Quantitative Theory of Morality, in which Zach Posner – now in the dementia phase – offers the warning that there is only so much good to be gained. “I estimate that when the moral quotient of a social group begins to decline, a string of bad behavior will inevitably feel bad as well.” Jurors, jewelers, Jews – regardless of the size or derivation of the group in question, the new theory applied to all.

The novel begins at a Hampstead dinner party. One of the guests is Will, a writer who knows the assembled company as only its creator knows it. Johnny Freedman entertains everyone with his scheme to grow vicuñas in the Aylesbury Hundreds; Kathy McCloskey is worried that her husband may be having an affair; Phil Szabo mixes cocktails. Phil is rumored to be some kind of spy, but Will is quick to dismiss him as a State Department employee. “I always thought of Phil as a secondary character, who had no real importance, was just there to make up the numbers.” As for Will himself, “Although I was ostensibly the narrator, and privy to everything in this tale masquerading as life—I was without a doubt the least important of all. After all, what did anyone know about me, besides the fact that I painted in watercolours, was transformed in the studio and conformed to these zeros?”

Quantitative theory of ethics has crowds, including multiple iterations of itself. In each of the novel’s five parts, a similar scenario is repeated: the dinner party, the opera at Glyndebourne, the New Year’s gathering in Dorset, the holiday in La Spezia, and the disastrous funeral. These set pieces are played in a similar manner, including verbatim repetition of certain lines of dialogue, though their viewpoints and characteristics of the participants are strangely different: in one, the characters are all male, and labeled by the size of their penis. In the next story, they’re all female: Willa is now a thriller writer, and Filipa Szabo mixes mojitos.

With each new iteration, the tension mounts and the level of violence is unmistakable. “I’m fairly confident when I say that one of you will die, and die because of the moral failings of the group as a whole,” Posner warns. He wants Bettina Hausmann – who holds a senior position in a Swiss bank – to use a new semi-conscious data modeling technique for employers to predict the moment of maximum danger, but when Bettina returns from work in Zurich, she discovers that Britain as it was no longer exists. The Home Office’s Visitor Inspection Service (HOVIS) has replaced the old border inspection force and its theme tune (the slow movement of Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, of course) is played over the airport’s sound system. Bettina was told to arrive at Balls Pond Road with all the other Jews. Poundbury is the new Theresienstadt. The National Trust took over and Posner himself committed suicide out of despair. His expectations were fulfilled. The morality quotient has dropped to a level where the official signature on government documents is “Extermination of the Jews.”

The quantitative theory of ethics is a tumultuous political narrative. It’s all here: transgender rights, green issues, the Holocaust, the Gaza conflict, and the general immorality of the neoliberal elite. But the self is too good a writer to be a preacher at all. The novel strongly criticizes our current slide into the abyss. The path of doom can be very entertaining and this is due to the subject’s central preoccupation with language and imagination.

Even more than Martin Amis, Self reads like an early Nabokov: prickly, provocative, skilled in his delivery of linguistic jokes. Although the Quantitative Theory of Ethics might be described as a sly send-up of the Hampstead novel, there is pathos here too. The book’s long, elegiac conclusion makes direct reference to Self’s parlous state of health: “Will had been ill for a long time before he died. I wasn’t quite sure how long—but at least a decade. He had a blood disorder that eventually mutated into inevitable cancer.”

We can only hope that this playful, unsettling and highly intelligent work is not intended as a farewell, though it is proof enough of Nabokov’s self-certainty that art is the thing. This, and his city of London, the permanent physical facts of place and time: “I give my greatest credence of all to that smell, a combination of sepia, with the taint of damp flannel, the smell of burnt rubber, the dryness of old soot, and the Googleplex glimpses of a million and a billion cigarettes” – the incomparable taste of the Underground in a Hampstead tube.