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|date=August 2012
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408820145</amazonuk>
|amazonus=<amazonus>1408820145B008P0VA88</amazonus>
|website=http://will-self.com/
|video=
It's tempting to suggest that Self doesn't really like his readers all that much or at the very least doesn't care about their reading experience. The narrative is a stream of consciousness epic that doesn't break for silly ideas like chapters, or even many paragraphs, most of which last for two or three pages each. Similarly there is no chronological development or discernable structure and time frames and points of view are spliced together, often within the same paragraph. Most of us don't have the luxury of endless hours in which to read and have to fit reading in around life, necessitating putting a book down at some point. Quite where you are supposed to do this in ''Umbrella'' is a bit of a mystery. Even if you are enjoying it, it's a book that is so dense you will need to put it down.
Add to that Self's penchant for odd voices, which while easier to follow than in say ''The Book of Dave'' still feature oddities such as using a 'v' as a substitute for 'th' in what is broadly a cockney dialect, but still distract from the flow, particularly as the utterances are often quite random. Of course, this being a modernistic style, useful indicators such as quotation marks are completely old hat, although he does allow the luxury of italics what that sometimes but not always show speech.
Your views on what is an undeniably ambitious novel will depend on your tolerance for this modernistic approach. The title is from a James Joyce quotation and the inference is that this is a modern day ''Ulysses''. To some, the approach may be intriguing and the connections brought out by the style, but to me it detracted from what might have been an interesting look at psychiatry and the treatment of illness and the changes to that over the last hundred years. I'm all for a radical approach if it sheds new light on these things, but not if it merely obfuscates any message or point as this did for me.