The newest addition to the Disaster Studies PhD programme at All Saints University, a version of Manchester Metropolitan, is a young woman calling herself Simone Weil. “Like the philosopher?” asks one of her fellow students. Yes, like the philosopher who starved herself to death in 1943. “She died as a martyr,” Simone explains. “She sounds like a nutcase,” her new friend replies. “Are you a nutcase too?”
Surprisingly, Simone is one of the more well-adjusted characters stalking the pages of Lars Iyer’s My Weil. It is a novel bubbling with madness. The Manchester streets are full of crazed addicts and murderous gangsters. The nights are filled with screaming. The All Saints PhD students aren’t doing much better. Narrator Johnny and his gang of fellow nihilist philosophers are convinced the end of the world is nigh. And they’ve all but given up on their dissertations.
This doomy, often hilarious book continues in the vein of Iyer’s previous two novels – Nietzsche and the Burbs and Wittgenstein Jr – which also brought European philosophy to the streets of England in order to comment on the meaning of existence. The set-up allows for a biting dissection of modern life, the enjoyable guying of academic pretensions, and some sharp satire on the state of higher education.
Johnny and his friends know that they are lucky. They’re working class, with scholarships to study things like “performance philosophy” and “the religious avant-garde”. It is a stay of execution, before they have to join the real world and get real jobs. Rather endearingly, they are aware that they are second-rate (“Must have been positive discrimination for idiots”). They are also aware of the process of marketisation that has turned education into “bullet points and aims and objectives and learning outcomes” to be sold back to them as “a bunch of bullshit credentials”.
Iyer evokes a depressingly bland academic environment: all business-speak (“Professor Bollocks, advising us to find an accountability buddy”) and endless glass buildings (“All space. An ocean of floor tiles. Vast windows. All Saints Library: half cafe, half foyer”). Manchester is equally depressing, with soulless skyscrapers and business centres renamed “Unknown Pleasures Towers” and “the Tony Wilson Centre” and filled with “mancuniana” by their billionaire owners. The new Manchester skyline is observed to be a fine place to watch the coming apocalypse.
The pace of the narrative is necessarily lethargic as Johnny and co sleepwalk through their days, loafing, procrastinating, and feeling sorry for themselves. “Things are exactly the same as yesterday, Valentine says. Today is yesterday, basically. As it will be tomorrow.” There is no plot as such. This carries an obvious risk – that of boredom for the reader, too. Things aren’t helped by the self-consciously grandiose prose, which often billows into the mock-heroic (“Oh, those hundreds of pages! Business Studies Guy. Oh, those heavy, heavy books!”) or the lavishly repetitious (“A cunning move, though it sounds like a joke. A clever ploy, though it sounds like self-parody”).
These tics and quirks make for an unruly and oddly bloated novel; one that only ever seems half interested in its characters (Simone is almost completely consigned to the background). Nevertheless, it has its gloomy pleasures: its portrait of postgraduate malaise is both funny and poignant, and its vision of a world that hasn’t yet noticed its own collapse is, unhappily, all too recognisable.
• My Weil by Lars Iyer is published by Melville House (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
