Will Self is rightly admired for the sheer energy of his writing, his pyrotechnic wit and wordplay, and his willingness to experiment with genre and narrative. He is also criticised as ill-disciplined, self-indulgent and more concerned with style than substance. These strengths and weaknesses are both on display in Liver, which he characteristically subtitles A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes. This is not simply a fancy way of saying the book consists of four interrelated stories: “surface anatomy” is a technical term for the description of features that can be discerned merely by looking at, rather than dissecting, an organism. So, is there more here than meets and dazzles the eye?

Livers feature largely in the first three stories: being destroyed by alcohol in Foie Humain, colonised by cancer in Leberknödl, and devoured by a vulture in Prometheus. They disappear from view in Birdy Num Num, the least satisfactory story, which instead describes a group of drug addicts waiting for their fix, and is narrated by a virus. The book nevertheless ends where it began, in hell — and this is perhaps its real subject.

The title of the first story punningly nods to Poulenc’s opera La Voix Humaine, in which an increasingly desperate woman pleads on the phone with the lover who is abandoning her. Desperation certainly hangs over the Plantation, a frowsty private drinking club in Soho closely modelled on Muriel Belcher’s infamous Colony Room. Belcher’s role is taken by an equally foul-mouthed queen called Val Carmichael, and among the Plantation’s denizens is a thinly disguised version of Francis Bacon. The infernal atmosphere of the club is well evoked and the story contains some good jokes. But its central conceit, that Carmichael’s surreptitious spiking of his barman-lover’s lager with vodka is a form of force-feeding, doesn’t really work (the livers of both human and goose might end up enlarged, but foie gras is not made from necrotic tissue), and the lurch into science-fiction, although signalled, seems a narrative cop-out.

Similarly, Prometheus runs entertainingly enough with an idea, but then stumbles. Unlike Mark Merlis, whose novel Pyrrhus convincingly transported characters from The Iliad to the New York gay scene, Self seems a little half-hearted about relocating Greek myth in the world of modern-day advertising executives. Prometheus, a Greek Cypriot from north London, works at Titan, an agency renowned for “its genius at breathing fire into the most sodden products”. So far, so allusive and satirical; but you feel the story would have worked better if Self had found a metaphor for Prometheus’s punishment by Zeus rather than introducing a real vulture.

The longest and best story is Leberknödel, in which Joyce, a woman with terminal cancer, travels to Zurich in order to undergo “assisted suicide”. Self brilliantly describes the horrifying build-up to this clinical act of self-destruction, but at the last minute Joyce changes her mind. Her subsequent recovery leads to her being taken up by local Catholics in search of miracles, and the story enjoyably satirises Switzerland as another kind of hell.

Self delights in baroque elaboration, but it often seems that he is piling on words and images more for effect or decoration than because they are integral to the structures he is creating. The result is less like architecture than patisserie. He is undoubtedly one of contemporary literature’s showmen, but his showmanship is relentless, and occasionally goes awry. His wordplay, for example, can be clumsy, as when an un-loving mother reflects upon “the daughter she had borne and beared”, and his cultural references are not always as sharp as they might appear. However much one might enjoy this book, when Self writes that a shop is “trying to flog ‘gear’ that hadn’t been ‘fab’ since the publication of the Wolfenden Report”, one merely reflects testily that the Wolfenden Report was published in 1957, long before such words came into use, and what he really means is “since the Wolfenden Report passed into law” in 1967.

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