On several levels, novelist Will Self’s memoir, Will, is anything but an easy read.

Self’s latest act of perversity is to follow up...acclaimed novels with a drug memoir told in the third person.

The logistical minutiae of drug-taking have always been exceedingly boring.

Self charges his first-ever memoir with harrowing—and, occasionally, humorous—accounts of drug addiction.

Like many drug memoirs, Will provides a not entirely pleasant, quasi-immersive experience: to ingest its headachy prose and sickly imagery as Will overdoses in Mile End and slumps in hallucinatory immobility in a New Delhi toilet is to feel your blood turning a sour sort of yellow. Self’s writing has the same technicolour velocity, malign comedy and arbitrary use of italicisation and ellipsis as his best novels, but it also imitates the fuzzy contractions in time and the odd discontinuity leaps of an addict’s brain in ways that gradually offer diminishing returns. It is also sometimes numbingly boring.

...at 58, Self has decided it’s time to kill the memoir instead.

...the problem with this rambling and random, overlong yarn: as John Cooper Clarke has said, when deflecting questions about his own lost decade, 'all junkies’ stories are the same'.

... suggests that the car has finally left the road, fallen apart, burst into flames and taken several other vehicles with it. The narrative of the book, rebarbatively cast in the third person, is episodic, freewheeling and associative. It’s also marked by a weakness for supposedly ironic cliches, irritatingly portentous ellipses, the repetition of advice bequeathed to him by his mother and a clumsy habit of attempting to lend his story temporal texture by deploying allusions to (and quotations from) contemporary music and culture. It is also self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing and pyrotechnically mean-spirited.

...an extreme example of Will Self run riot.

Interspersed amid the self-analysis in Will is an inventory of his prodigious drug-taking – including smoking dope, popping barbiturates and tranquillisers, snorting morphine, injecting smack and 'shooting up shit coke' – but the law of diminishing returns kicks in quickly.