
The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker
By Will Self
Huge fan of Giles Coren. A less smarmy, more sophisticated iteration of Jay Rayner, Coren brings you meals with dreams attached. We’ll never eat at The Savoy, and sniffing at a slightly overdone rib-eye rather than the cost and how it will affect our credit rating, isn’t the stuff of reality for most of us.
But Giles shows us how it should be done, with a flickknife in the back of his right Chelsea boot with which to puncture a hole in the hopes of a restaurateur with lofty ambitions that fell out of step with her head chef’s abilities.
Wouldn’t it be fun, then, to have someone pretending to be like the rest of us, reviewing the kind of tawdry miseryholes to which our budgets stretch.
Of course, it would never work. Because people only buy books which hint at a life to which we could only aspire. We only spend so much time in Facebookland because it gives us pause from our own miserable existence to to cling on to the ideal fostered by our fake friends with their fake news and kids’ beaming smiles, hiding toothache, adolescent frustration and parental breakups.
Yet it did work. It worked magnificently. Because piloting this book of restaurant reviews at such demeaning palaces of gobfilling such as KFC, Pizza Hut and Yo! Sushi, is none less than the intellectual’s intellectual, Will Self.
Self applies his substantial lexicon and quick-wittedness to a variety of pedestrian situations, proferring such comedy genius as ‘sticky rice that would pair beautifully with a mastic gun’.
Self is a Marmite writer. Some loathe his cerebral insights because to many of us, they are simply unattainable. Meanwhile I’ll revel and bask in his observations because they help me expand my vocabulary and enjoy rich belly laughs in equal proportion.
I liken Will Self to a wry and several planes smarter Peter Kay. Comedy giants both, they deviate at the point where one takes a more popularist route while the other seeks to ransack common ground and build upon it a cathedral to a better way.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker is a cracker of a book, and if your belly aches for levity with a side of anthropological acuity this will leave you feeling sated and not shortchanged.

