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Ware2, guv?
Wonderful, witty, biting and barbed, but also with a streak of compassion beneath it all, despite the suspicion that Self tried to stamp out the pathos and leave only a bleak misanthropy. Although there is all the savagery of the attack on human inanity and cruelty that invites comparisons with Swift, there isn't quite the contempt for pernicious little vermin that Swift relentlessly exhibits. The comparison with Swift is useful though, since here we see the familiar aspects of our lives and traditions blown into Brobdignagian proportions, while the talking animals, forever child-like, are butchered for their meat - disconcertingly conflating the Houhyhnhms with a modest proposal.
Self's satire is as grotesque as Swift and Rabelais, and the effectiveness of his satire lies not just in the way the far-fetched alienness suddenly invokes the absurdity of our world, deadened as we are to its familiarity, but also from the rigour with which he pursues his conceits. The fabric of the city transformed into a new Jerusalem, the absurd mythologies replaced not with sense but with further senseless mythology, the sheer irration of religion and culture - the terrible logic of each conceit is followed doggedly and anarchically. Self doesn't so much prick the surface of pomp and self-regard, as much as languidly climb inside and dismantle them, line by lugubrious line, or pulverise them like a giant Gulliver at last standing up straight in a holy Lilliputian church.
And the ultimate hero is the language itself: tracts of mercurial liquidity mesh ceaselessly with neologisms, whose each use grafts new layers of meaning and implication, til you're left dizzy by the sheer dazzling possibility of each new sentence. There is a joyous heteroglossia to graze on here, to be wallowed in with child-like pleasure until Self sticks the dagger in your throat, and you finally leave to be with Dave.