Phone by Will Self   {Reviewed by THOMAS} Will Self concludes the threesome of novels that comprise his modernist ‘Busner-Project’ with this 617-page bilge of words pumped straight out of the minds of his characters, notably psychiatrist Zack Busner, drifting into a dementia that weakens his grip on the present and delivers him to the breakfast bar of a Manchester hotel without his trousers, and Jonathan De’Ath, spy and secret lover of Colonel Gawain Thomas, about to lead his troops into Iraq. Self’s great achievement and presumed intention is to create, by the breaking and reconstitution of language, a remarkable study of how thought moves in the mind, looping, moving at any one moment on many parallel tracks, in cul-de-sac curlicues and feedback loops. Thought is constantly assailed by interference, often arising from the mechanisms of language itself but also from the instability of referents, and Self’s text is full of rather funny linguistic jokes and precise ironic observations, and is frequently every bit as irritating as your own thoughts. The identities of the narrators segue into one another, Busner’s actual world barely registering on, and having no clear delineation from, the loosely bundled and rebundled memories and urges that hardly pass as personhood, the distance between each stitch of ‘actual’ narrative containing great tangled loops and knots of mental thread. If our thoughts cannot define us, what can be the organising principle of our identities? (if we are to have identities). The mobile phone is a technological intermediary positioned on the membrane between the so-called internal and so-called external parts of our worlds, positioned, in other words, at the only place where identity could be located, a place of interplay and contention. Do we define our identities or can they only be defined for us by others? Not only do we outsource our memories, our communicating faculties, our (illusory) identities to our mobile phones, these mobile phones are linked, at barely a few steps remove, to all other mobile phones, and it could be said that all phones comprise one vast technorganism, a collective consciousness parasitic upon (and formative of) the thoughts and words of the flaffing and ludicrous individual consciousnesses it auxilliarises.