Will Self : How The Dead Live : Dead Man Talking

Filed under: Chris Hall, Death, Interviews, Novels, Will Self   

Chris Hall has a lively conversation with Will Self

Although, at 39, Will Self is approaching mid-life and he can see the "lowering storm of age and extinction" ahead of him, there is still certainly nothing in his prose or his physiognomy to suggest that he will become flabby or paunchy. Indeed, even though his new novel How The Dead Live is divided up into sections of "Dying", "Dead" and "Deader", Self has if anything attacked the page with even more vigour and purpose than before.

So it's rather reassuring to see Self looking very healthy, tanned as he is from a holiday in the Canaries, reassuring also that the Coke he orders comes in a glass with ice. We meet at the Groucho Club in Soho, London, one of Self's former haunts but which he says he hardly ever visits anymore. Outside he crouches down to chain his 22cc Go-Ped Bigfoot - a small motorised scooter - and strides into the bar wearing a black leather jacket, crisp white shirt and a pair of well-worn brown Chelsea boots to go with his new cropped haircut.

How The Dead Live is a mordant and disturbing allegory of life after death and death in life, which derives some of its structure from The Tibetan Book Of The Dead. Of course, Self has used that particular book in his fiction before: "The North London Book Of The Dead" from The Quantity Theory Of Insanity and a chapter in My Idea Of Fun. But whereas "The North London Book Of The Dead" was about the failure of a young man to come to terms with the death of his mother, How The Dead Live is very much an objective description of what happens to someone in the after-death plane. That someone is Lily Bloom (an evocative name, encoding notions of life and death), a 65-year-old American anti-semitic Jewish wiseacre who at the beginning of the novel lies dying of cancer in the Royal Ear Hospital in London. It is a Self-like irony that it's a stiff who provides him with one of his most fully realised characters, especially given that he has been dismissive of the very notion of character in the past.

Self wanted to call the book Deader, but his French translator persuaded him not to, and instead suggested the eventual title, which is also the title of a French film from 1999. When Self was sitting in his study one afternoon mulling this all over, the title of a Derek Raymond book (aka thriller writer Robin Cook) swam out at him, and then, he says, he really did have some agonising over it. "How The Dead Live isn't perfect for the book," he admits, and says that initially he wrote an exculpatory forward explaining why he'd chosen the title. "But then, I very much wanted to take my voice out of this book. I wanted How The Dead Live to just happen in the reader's mind, decoupled from any presuppositions about any framing of the text in that way." Once again, it's a novel where the moral fulcrum is someway off the page.

Although Martin Rowson's endpaper maps attempt to locate the fictional topography of How The Dead Live the world it describes is very much filtered through Lily. In other words, as the preface from The Tibetan Book Of The Dead says, it takes place on Lily's "mind stage". Lily's venom and disgust, her vitriolic wit and bile is well sustained over the 400 pages,.but the ultimate effect is one of poignancy, of playing to the empty gallery as she clings to her personality. With his latest novel, Self has gone to the core of the belief that the essence of the self is the personality.

So does he have semi-mystical beliefs about death himself? "I have completely mystical beliefs in that area. I'm off with the fucking fairies," he says, laughing. "I always have been. I've never been a materialist particularly, I've always been a transcendental idealist." So why the obsession with The Tibetan Book Of The Dead? "I've had this preoccupation with it from when we were sitting around rolling joints on it in the late 70s, and it's perrenial in my work. The point is that when you push materialism as far as it can go then it really shows itself up. People who say they are materialists, they're hoisted by their own petard. I don't want to sound like a character in "Ab Fab" who wants to give it all up and bang tambourines with a bandeau, but that's pretty much how I feel at the moment. People aren't really materialists, they don't really want the car, the house, the Phillipe Starck juicer, they actually want the cachet, the status and the culture that go with those things."

Self is keen to stress that the novel is what it appears to be: "It really is a book about death. It's a Buddhist allegory," he says, allowing that of course there are satirical elements. When Lily Bloom, newly dead, is taken away in a mini cab to a suburb of London called Dulston - really a disintegrating part of Lily Bloom's own psyche of course- she goes to a meeting of the Personally Dead, where they have a 12-step programme for those who can't or won't come to terms with being dead."Why didn't it even occur to me that there was only one person who could've arranged these particular elements of my own experience, and cobbled them together into this dreary scene?" At one of the meetings someone speaks on the topic of "Why Are We Dead?", about "how disturbing it was to realise that style was personalty, and that our sense of self was nothing but mannerisms and negative emotions."

Lily gets a job at Baskin's Public Relations when she is dead, "typing up still more releases on fresh kitchenware, country club launches, innovatory thermal socks - whatever new effluvia were next to join the ever widening torrent of increasingly trivial innovation." (There is a great AJ Ayer joke, in that "death hadn't thawed his notoriously glacial logic", and "only such a relentless rationalist could gain any succour from these, the nervous tics of the afterlife.")

Posted on October 1st, 2000.

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