House Of Meetings – Martin Amis

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Any new Martin Amis book always comes with plenty of baggage, and House Of Meetings is no exception. As his first full-length fiction since 2003’s Yellow Dog, it comes complete with high expectations and the ugly face of his previous achievements leering over its shoulder. You can almost hear the critics sharpening their knives even before it hits the shelves.

Like so many of his previous novels, it also brings with it some worryingly dense prose and more than a few literary references. His books have never made for easy reading, but that’s exactly where their strength lies, and it’s good to see that one of the English language’s greatest wordsmiths still shows no sign of sugaring the pill as he grows older. You may love Amis’s work, or you may hate it – but it’s hard to view it with anything other than admiration.

House Of Meetings is significant for more than just the long wait that preceded it, however. It shows Amis dipping his toes into the waters of historical fiction, and coming back with what feels like a political fable from start to finish.

This is the story of a Russian survivor of the Arctic gulags, told exclusively from his point of view and taking the form of a lifetime confession. We learn of our nameless narrator’s early life, his acclimatisation to the challenges of the gulag, and his struggles to re-acclimatise to the real world afterwards. We also learn of his rivalry with his half-brother Lev. Both siblings lust after the enigmatic Jewess Zoya, but it is Lev who eventually marries her, before he too is sent to the gulag.

Of course, this is a Martin Amis novel, so it is also filled with unspeakable deeds and horror at the pain and suffering that man inflicts on fellow man. As if it’s not enough that he fantasizes about his brother’s wife on a daily basis, the narrator also confesses that he’s a multiple rapist, his crimes having been committed in the aftermath of the war. Life in the gulag is shown with a characteristic harshness too, as Amis turns his spotlight on the historical atrocities and everyday barbarism of a country in turmoil.

All of this should come as no surprise to this who have read his work before, and here he delivers the same kind of intellectual violence that we’ve come to expect over the years. What marks House Of Meetings out from his other novels – and, in some ways, undermines its considerable effects – is the need to present historical facts in large, indigestible chunks scattered throughout the fiction. The outcome is that these puddles of historical reality dilute the narrative, and while they are often intriguing in their own right, they don’t make for a great novel.

Historical fiction is a delicate balancing act between its two disparate elements – history and fiction – and here Amis doesn’t always get the mix right. In the end, the story of two brothers and their troubled love lives is swamped by the weight of the history surrounding it, leaving the characters feeling shallow and unfulfilling. They’re at their most vibrant and intriguing during the chapters set in the gulag itself, but what may have made an interesting novella starts to drag as it progresses, and the ending feels more like a political rant than the kind of fully-realised fiction that we’ve come to expect.

By all means read House Of Meetings for the vivid descriptions of life in the gulags, or for snapshot of the last century of Russian history – just don’t expect it to be vintage Amis. We may have to wait at least another three years for that.

“Never meet your heroes; they always disappoint” runs the old saying. Invited from my humble Lancastrian abode down to the Brighton realm of the greatest shit-stirring iconic hack of our times, I wasn’t so much afraid of Julie Burchill not living up to her reputation as living up to it too much. Would she be gentle with me?

If Julie needs an introduction, it’s tough knowing where to start. Running away from her working-class Bristol childhood at the age of 17 to scribble speed-driven venom for the NME at the height of punk, marrying and deserting Tony Parsons prior to queening it over the Groucho journo set, skipping gaily from highly paid column to spiky column in a variety of newspapers across the land. Enraging the Left with her hard-line anti-liberalism and some-time Thatcher worship, the Right with her brazen pro-Soviet Communism and hatred of the bourgeoisie, and everyone with her particular and peculiar blend of narcissism, iconoclasm and rudeness. Leaving second husband Cosmo Landesman for an affair with Charlotte Raven, subsequently shacking up with Charlotte’s younger brother to whom she is now married. Etcetera etcetera.

There’s no time for a biog here, but suffice to say my longstanding admiration for the deliriously violent punch of her writing, often despite myself, was why I found myself here on the day. No I don’t agree with a tonnes of what she says, but for me she has obtained “Benefit of Clergy”, a phrase Orwell used about Dali (even though Julie hates Orwell too: worst offence in the world in my book). This basically means offensiveness is to some extent excused by how well it’s delivered, and what’s behind it. But mainly how it’s delivered. It’s what separates Jerry Sadowitz from Jim Davidson, and South Park from the Sunday Sport.

Julie’s profile is higher now than for many a year after finally breaking into the previously shunned medium of TV. A Channel 4 adaptation of her lesbian teen-scream novel Sugar Rush will be screened later this year, whilst her typically pro-prole, contrary and acidly delivered defence of the much maligned phenomenon of “Chavs” on the eponymous Sky One documentary last February slung a Molotov cocktail amongst the dinner party set once again.

The journey down South is made all the more surreal for me by being stuck on the last leg in the train from Euston to Brighton in the next carriage to our glorious leader Anthony Blair, a month before his phyrric Election victory, who graciously smirks over when I take a snap of him. I can’t stand the guy but little plebby me feels like Alice In Famousland. Weird, weird. I get to wander for too short a time round the rather beautiful town of Brighton (never before visited) with its poignantly derelict pier, until finally getting the cab round to her spacious detached home on the Hove border. Quick fag, deep breath, down the huge garden into the valley of whatsits.

Julie answers the door with an imperious handshake as she invites me to the lair. “You’re Ben? You must come in,” intones the famous high-pitched quickfire yet lilting Bristol burr. She’s half the size she was two years back and looks lovely in her black and white ensemble. I’d heard she was a nervy character around strangers, but whilst her initial demeanour is slightly distant, she is clearly at pains to put me at ease, even introducing me to her fellow guests with the unnervingly gallant “This is Ben Granger, the great writer from Spike Magazine.” (Fuckin ‘ell!)

The guests are Gary Mulholland, music journalist and author of This Is Uncool, Zoe Williams from The Guardian (both in capacity of friends rather than interviewers), her teenage son Jack, and her cleaner (and bestest friend the world) Nadia. The Burchill abode has a brash décor of pink walls and tiger skin couches which mirrors its owner exquisitely, as does the louche sprinkling of bottles, ash-trays and smoke. Oh yes, and the small Israeli flag atop the mantelpiece, given her oft-avowed Zionism. Whilst I get my MP3 recorder complete with my son’s kiddies mike together, I mention my fellow train traveller which gets the surprising response: “God, he’s sexy, innee? You’re a man, you wouldn’t understand.” I also mention how attractive I found Brighton’s bohemian Trafalgar Street. “God I never go there. Full of dossers.” I mention a couple of pubs I’ve stopped in (not mentioning I was there to steady my awe-struck nerves) “I don’t really go to pubs much to be honest with you. I don’t want to be the mad woman sitting in the corner!”

Generous host to a fault, Julie even sends Zoe and Nadia to the offie when I mention I’d like red wine which isn’t on offer. When I finally fidgetilly set up she directs myself and Gary to the house gym- now disused and decorated by a large Cuban flag representing the other great love of her ideological life, Communism- to conduct the interview. Sitting cross legged on the floor we embark.

So , how was writing for teenagers different from writing her novels for adults?

“Well, I’ll be honest with you, the first novel I wrote for adults was very successful but the other two went right down the toilet. So it wasn’t like a choice to write for young people, I just thought no-one’s sitting around waiting to hear from me in the adult world so let’s inflict it on some other poor …”

Yes, but were you consciously writing in a different way?

“Oh yeah, yeah! You don’t have to try so hard do you?..There’s a certain reason why people who twenty years ago would have been writing literary novels, like Gary, like myself, aren’t doing it now. I think I’d fall at the first hurdle. But my immediacy, my lack of.education which stop me from doing what Ian McEwan or [mutters scornfully] Martin Amis do is part of what we love about ourselves, and what suited a book like this..it was very pleasurable and it felt very normal to do.”

Given your typically hard-line on paedophilia, did you ever feel there was a tension in writing a lesbian novel about 15 year old girls? I’d heard there was more sex scenes in it initially before they were cut out?

“Naaah there was never any real sex in it because I thought that would be unbearably pervy and a total contradiction of everything I stood for. Don’t go there. Though for the TV show apparently she’s older, like 21 so they can make it a bit more.hardcore. Is that a horrible thing to say? No if it was kids it would be horrible wouldn’t it? I’ve had no input whatsoever in the programme so far but next week I’m going on-set. And I’m looking forward to it.”

The drama is still to come but the documentary has already been screened. “Chavs” was a classic Burchill column brought to life; one-sided, contrary, mixing pop culture and high sociological comment with humour and venom. Its subject was the eponymous; the baseball capped, Burberry clad, gold jewellery bedecked folk devils that walk down every high street in Britain. The butt of every middle-class sneery joke. As per often Julie has bloody mindedly found a devilish cause to defend; a hate-figure for snooty Telegraph toffs, Mail paranoiac patio-sniffers and Guardian liberal snoots alike.

Asked about why this issue was so close to her heart, the full ferocity of her anger really takes off. The turbo Bristol voice takes off, hard in vowels, soft in tone, ruthless in content.

“Now, I’m a very idle person and I’m very relaxed, and my ideal dream is just to lie on the sofa all day eating chocolates. But when I do get agitated and when I do get a bee in my bonnet I DO go all the fucking way. When I was told about things like Chavscum [the website dedicated to promoting hatred of all things "chav"]which I hadn’t known about, and the abuse they were putting out, I’m afraid I saw red. It seemed to me that the kind of people who are doing things like “Chavscum” ten years ago would have been racists, and would have been that loathsome and that disgusting. Now they can’t be racists because of the CRE and certain laws that have been passed – quite rightly. But the white working class are now the only people you can fucking hate with impunity, and I felt I just had to raise my fucking voice.”

It should be stressed there is no editorial trickery involved in Julie’s broadsides here. This is simply how she talks. Very, very fast too. The only other person I can think whose words race along as fast as they think is Patrick Moore.

“It’s so tempting to be lured in by the defence of humour and irony. One of the worst things you can say to somebody is they’ve got no sense of humour. If you look at the personal columns, you’ll often see people admitting that they’re ugly or not bright or fat – no-one will ever admit to having no sense of humour. It’s the final insult, the final thing no-one will admit to. But I didn’t want to get the fucking joke. If there was a joke I didn’t want to get it, just like I didn’t want to get it when my parents were watching “Love Thy Neighbour” and thought it was funny to call someone “nig-nog.” Instinctively, I just thought it was disgusting. To me laughter and great humour comes from taking on people above you on the social scale.”

The documentary featured an extremely ill-tempered spat with TV “personality” Vanessa Feltz, who opined that her very worthwhile existence should not be sullied by having to pay her taxes in supporting welfare payments to such dread creatures. Really though Julie, you were great friends after the cameras stopped weren’t you?

“I just wanted to punch her fucking face in! Listen, I’ve got a friend who thinks al Quaeda have “got a point”, I can sit with him and listen to that shit, I can listen to taxi drivers being racist. But when I sit with a middle-class person going on, I don’t care if it is a kind of prejudice, I just wanna kill the fuckers and I think you’ve got no right to say a fucking word, you just don’t know fucking anything about anything. To me, it’s not about race, there’s the middle class and the working class; us against them. Well, there’s three groups really but that’s the upper class who don’t count cos they’re fucking retarded…but put a middle-class person in front of me, I don’t care if they’re left-wing or right-wing, talk to them for five minutes, and the filthy fucking snob in them will come out.”

Even when angry she is increasingly at ease, and warm in her demeanour. She doesn’t laugh much but does grin mischievously from time to time. Possibly libellous comments about La Feltz follow. But what would you say to people who claim that chavs are only a part of the working-class, and that criticising the former is not criticising the latter?

“People say that to me trying to be nice, I always say ‘Don’t do me any fucking favours!’ When someone tries to differentiate between the deserving and the undeserving working-class the black heart of me cleaves towards the undeserving ones. My father was a member of the deserving working-class, he ended up coughing his fucking lungs out for three years and dying of tumors because of it. The working-class in the old days kept their heads down, were so fucking decent and wonderful, and it got them jack shit. Chavs are there for a reason, because the decent way, the good way, didn’t fucking work. The idea that after the break up of the manufacturing industries and the disrespect poured on the heads of the trade unions and everything the working-class stood for that their would still, masochistically, be this class of noble men and women trudging on and on and on waving banners and singing wonderful songs – WHY?! We’d fucking had enough. We are what they made us! And they don’t like us being like that because they know we’re tougher than they are and they know we’ll win.”

Julie has gone into an impressively ferocious, literally breast-beating oratory by this point, suddenly breaking off to grinningly state “What am I shouting at you two for, you didn’t fucking do it…!” She digresses once more, expressing here near eugenic belief in prole supremacy.

“Did you know there’s this thing called ‘the indestructible nine percent’ in society? They’ve all got green or hazel eyes, they can drink the most amazing amount, and they’ve got this weird blood group called rhesus negative. I’ve got all these three things and they are ALL found amongst the labouring classes…listen would I make this shit up?! How fucking mad do I want to look?”

But in defending “chavs” culturally, is this not a tacit acknowledgment that the political fight for the proletariat is lost?

“Naaaah, the fight cannot be lost, the fight changes.”

So to quote dear Lenin: “What is to be done” politically?

“I’m hoping to find out. What Marx analysed was basically right, but it’s so rich and strange the way things mutate. Who ten years ago would have predicted the decline of McDonalds? Who twenty years ago would have seen the downfall of all I believe in, with the Soviet Union? But because of the strength and the numbers of the working-class, both in this country and globally, we will decide what happens in the end and it really won’t be that bad.”

One of the main criticisms levelled at Julie is because her extremes of position are so contrary to “accepted” mainstream norms (pro-union yet pro-hanging, massively xenophobic about the Germans and French whilst showing a fierce anti-racism where black people are concerned, pro-Soviet yet pro-Israeli) that she is insincere and feigning them to shock. But while she unquestionably fires forth her beliefs in as provocative a manner as possible, hearing her talk about them there is no doubt whatsoever in her sincerity. She quite clearly really believes them. No doubt that makes it a lot worse for many! Her passion when talking about “the workers” and socialism in particular is unquestionable. I suggest that the success of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela is a real international working-class triumph that is being unsung. Julie initially suggests he is corrupt from what she’s heard. I strongly disagree.

“I don’t know enough about Venezuela; I dare say you’re right. But remember when whatsisname, Ortega? The Sandinista leader was accused of molesting his daughter, well ten years ago we’d have all cleaved together and said she was lying, but, thank God for feminism, how do we know that. I was brought up in a Communist household, when I moved to London I met Paul Foot and was briefly in the SWP, and the one thing my dad the working-class Stalinist and Paul Foot the middle-class Trotskyist had in common is they couldn’t fucking look at themselves, see the bad in their side. That’s what attracted me to people on the right for a while, like Alan Clark. What a fucking cool man!”

She proceeds to launch into an entertaining and fairly accurate impression of Clark fantasising about Russian women in his infamously lecherous manner. Julie has latched onto the theme of the Left denying its own crimes now and, as ever, there’s no getting her off it.

“My dad taught me that you hide your own sin and you don’t take yourselves apart; I’ve realised recently that we’ve got to criticise ourselves before we can start on anyone else. In that way lies strength. I love Mr Castro and the Cuban revolution, and it’s achieved so much; they can cure blindness there whereas they can’t in America, but you go there and see twelve year old prostitutes; it obviously wasn’t meant to be like this. And the things he did to gay people, though I dare say he had a good reason…But to turn away helps no-one. I really think the Left has to take itself apart before anyone else, because we can, because we’re stronger and more intelligent than the Right.”

There we are then, to reverse Groucho’s old maxim, whether many on the Left want her or not -pro Bush and Blair on the war as she is- that’s the club she places herself in at heart. I can’t help but have a tentative go here; what about her wonderful 2002 Guardian columns where she ripped “Princess Toni” to pieces on a weekly basis due to his betrayal of the Labour movement?

“That’s simple, Blair is a great war-leader, like Churchill; useless in times of peace. Who would vote for the poor sod after that?”

So you’re not taking away your criticisms of his domestic policies, privatisation, sucking up to the bosses?

“I’ve never voted for Mr Blair and I don’t imagine I will.[This interview was conducted shortly before the 2005 General Election] The last time I voted was for the Socialist Alliance locally, and UKIP nationally, or was it the other way round? I don’t even remember. I’ve got nothing to hide.”

She repeats the highly entertaining story of how, on her father’s death bed she vowed to defend the name of his old hero Joe Stalin, only to be told by Bill “You ain’t been saying mad stuff about him have you girl? He was a terrible man!”

So who are her all time heroes really?

“It sounds really mealy-mouthed, but the people who no-one knows the name of; they’re the heroes.”

So your other heroes have disappointed you?

“I don’t feel disappointed because I’ve grown up, very late in life, and I realise people fall short of things for a reason as we’re all human. Like all the bad things Mr Castro has done to gay people. The heroes are the people we never ever hear of and that is the essence of their heroicness. There’s a certain reason why people of real quality don’t rise to positions of power. People like my dad; who have nothing to prove. I’ve no element of self-loathing but I do realise that part of my success is just me showing off, and wanting to queen it over other people, to be frank with you. When you get people like Emma Thompson, Dawn French, Lenny Henry, the Red Nose lot – unless you tied the fuckers down and wired them up to a lie detector -and then you’d get it – you’d never get them to admit that there was any element in their desire to be famous other than them wanting to help people in Niger. To me it’s the glory of being a human being that we are a mixture of complete corruption and the most shimmering, mercury-like goodness. Of course there are some just purely evil people – like Dido- and just purely good people – like Jordan. But then there’s the glory and the black hearted corruption.it just knocks you out sometimes if you think about it too much. That’s why I prefer not to think about it too much and watch Tricia instead. A great deal of my life is spent running away from…my brain.”

In my review of Sugar Rush I presumptuously wrote of the characters “No-one talks like that, not even Julie in real life.” I was in fact completely wrong. Friendlier (to me at least), and with lots more swearing, but she talks pretty much as she writes. I won’t let the Iraq war go though, I’m catching the argument bug off her.

“Ben! Ben! What would you rather live under?! Listen I was brought up as a Soviet Empirist. My dad taught me to believe -literally- that American brains were one third less the size of ours. It’s been a very hard journey to lead me to support Mr Bush on this. But I do feel that a struggle of the dimensions my father saw, light against darkness, has emerged in the Middle East. The Arab people deserve everything we have. If that makes me a fucking racist then yeah. I won’t make any exceptions for these filthy rich people, the Saudi dynasty, or the Syrian Ba’athists who call themselves socialists.”

But surely the idea that Bush is exporting democracy to the Middle East is rather undermined when he lets the CIA organise a coup against democratic Venezuela?

“One thing at a time Ben! When a Hugo Chavez can emerge in the Arab world… I know about Allende. I’m not idealistic about America. It’s a dirty massive beast. Of course they’ll attack democracy in their own back yard. But – heavy the head that wears the crown – when they stay out of wars we call them filthy cowards – as my grandma used to say – if they get involved, they’re imperialists.”

It’s nice arguing with Julie but I know I’ll never win, and she graciously changes the subject herself to the fact that her dad wanted to emigrate to Russia and her mum to South Africa, the former for idealism, the latter because “They got bungalows!” At heart Julie is a patriot, and emigration is not the done thing.

“That phrase “whinging poms” it comes from when English people were encouraged to emigrate to Australia for twenty pounds, and they came back, and they literally cried for three weeks in relief, because they missed the rain, and the dreariness. That’s the fucking greatness, and the perversity of the English people for me. Every perverse, dreary weird thing about our people.”

Changing the subject myself, I remark that Julie often writes about Hollywood, and spends as much time praising the greats of the past as she does slagging off the stars of today. What’s the difference?

“In thirty years time, will a drag queen dress up as Sandra Bullock? Don’t think so! Sorry; that’s facile…my mother had no politics but.what made her in a way a feminist was watching Bette Davis films; seeing her in Jezebel saying “Ah wiiill wear mah red dress”: the idea of women behaving as they pleased, stroppily and strongly. It was the only thing to watch back then and weirdly watching them on a rainy day is a real part of my Englishness. God I sound gay, I sound like Morrissey! But anyway you don’t get strong women on screen any more, a “tough character” in films today is either tough cos she’s hiding her neediness, or she’s a psychopath.. I don’t think I’m a “strong woman”, I hate that patronising phrase, I think I’m a “tough broad”, that’s what I used to see on screen which I never do anymore. They’re either needy weedy vulnerable wickle things waiting to be hugged – or total fucking looners.”

As was often the case of her columns I find myself agreeing with something I hadn’t particularly dwelled on. It’s true that Hollywood seems to stand still while society moves on in a lot of respects.

“There’s a great book by Molly Haskell called From Reverence To Rape and she shows how, just as women were starting to assert themselves in the real world in the 60s, that was exactly the time Hollywood started to make films like Easy Rider, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, where women are literally either bitches, whores or rapees. Joan Collins played a missionary nun twice in the Fifties! Not any more. Do you think I’m like Nurse Ratchett?”

I get short shrift however when I suggest that Basic Instinct is the height of misogyny. “Oh no, that film just makes you want to go gay! Every girl likes that film for a reason, it’s the first time they showed a lesbian as really attractive.” But also an ice-pick wielding psychopath? “Yeah well, take the rough with the smooth. As I said earlier ‘no-one’s perfect’” My suggestion that Fatal Attraction is a misogynistic farrago is dismissed too “No, I don’t think Fatal Attraction means anything. The message is don’t fuck a woman who sits in a loft playing Madam Butterfly, and don’t fuck Michael Douglas!” Well, you can’t argue with that.

We’re all very drunk now (well I am anyway), so I just bat random subjects up and let Julie take them. First up is Ariel Sharon (readers of a sensitive disposition may wish to skip the next paragraph).

“To me he’s the God that failed. He could have been such a great man and he’s just a fucking pacifist now. No – don’t leave it! Israel is the only country I would fucking die for. He’s the enemy of the Jews. Chucking his own people off the Gaza; to me that’s disgusting. I’ve given you want you want; is that the “money shot”? He’s a good man but he’s got to learn to stand by his own people. ‘Cos no-one else will; Christ knows.” Julie certainly gets into her stride when I bring up the sordid subject of the Spectator sexual shenanigans which have so dominated the headlines of tabloids and broadsheets alike in recent months. (For the uninitiated, the proprieter, editor and half the staff of the fusty old Tory journal have been caught going at it hammer and tongues lately; the former with our former Home Secretary).

“Well it all made me glad I live the life of a provincial lady. Rod [Liddle]‘s a great young man, he once told me he applied for my old job at the NME, but he was always known as a lothario. I know one woman, a great friend of mine who thought he was so sexy she waited for three hours in a Bournemouth Travelodge on just like a promise – but she didn’t get none. Thank God I’m not a woman so I don’t fall for him. Simon Hoggart? What a dirty old man! Its always the quiet ones isn’t it? When it comes to Kimberley Quinn…I’ll say this and it doesn’t show me in a very good light..I never thought I’d use the word “slag” about anyone. Me and my friends, we know prostitutes, we don’t slag them off, but when it comes to her…we use it and God it feels good! Poor Mr Blunkett; fancy doing that to a blind man? Where was the dog? Must have been tied to summat. That’s what I can’t stand; it’s the animals that suffer in the end. But no, my friends have put it around, fucking like sailors and shit, but they’d never used that word before. But with Kimberley… It’s the creepy fertility relay race thing that did it I think. She just wanted to get knocked up. Desperate woman. She just wanted some sperm race. Like an egg and spoon race. Or a sack race. Or an egg and sack race – HA HA HA!! Put that in Ben right??”

Didn’t you once write for The Spectator though?

“I did some book reviews when my friend Dominic Lawson was editing. But then I’ll do anything for a Jew.”

Julie’s whirl of conversation swings one way to the next. Very friendly and complimentary, highly libellous asides splatter the whole interview. Julie is no stranger to the libel courts, but some of her comments will not appear on Spike as none of us of course would like to see this fine site shut down. One borderline accusation about a satirist I adore leads to her virulent hatred of Catholics. When I mention that I’m a Catholic her generous gallantry storms through once more “No, you’re not! Fuck off! Do you practice birth control?!” No of course I’m a very very lapsed one Julie. “See I knew you were, listen, lapsed Catholics are the aristocracy of the earth. I never met a lapsed I didn’t like. But them that cleave to their faith.I’ll shoot the fuckers.”

I ask about the time when one of my idols Morrissey walked through her door unannounced back in 1994 to a frosty reception…

“God I’d forgotten about that! That was like a very very bad marriage in three quarters of an hour:- imagine the play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in the space of three quarters of an hour. It’s not your dream; you’re in love with someone for five years and they turn up and we start arguing about whether you should put milk in Earl Grey tea or not. I knew I had to get him out before he visited the bathroom; “Why do you squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom?” Fuck off!”

Julie wrote an acerbic piece about their encounter at the time. For “acerbic” read “hatchet job”. Incredibly, given Morrissey’s famed propensity for dropping people who’ve offended him at the drop of a daff, they’ve restarted a friendly e-mail correspondence over the past few years. Clearly he couldn’t resist someone who’s even better at bitching about people than he is.

“I adore the man. He seems to be very civilised now; he seems more happy. Isn’t it funny it took America to make him more relaxed? I said to him, “You’ve grown into your looks, you look like someone’s sexy uncle that you’d get off with at a wedding.” And he said in his brilliantly witty way “Why do you think I go to so many weddings – known to me are not?” What a wonderfully Morrissey thing to say. Would you sleep with Morrissey if he asked and you were gay? If he was straight and I was single I still think I wouldn’t do it. I’d just be thinking “Oh fuck its Morrissey!” the whole time.”

Well, I must confess since early teenhood I’d always thought he’s the one man who just might “turn my head” as it were..

“You would?! But you’d have to slap him round a bit afterwards!! That’s what Madonna said about Billy Ray Cyrus. She said “I’d do him, but I’d have to slap him round a bit and make him cry afterwards because of Achey Breaky Heart” and I’d have to do that to Morrissey because – what’s the crap thing he’s done?- ‘Bengali In Platforms’? Course he’s a genius, but you wouldn’t wanna live with him would you?”

While her talk is littered with her trademark bile Julie assures me that she is far less keen to cause fuss in everyday life than she once was.

“I’m much better than I was. Even by the time I was 17 at the NME I was well castrated by then. You should have seen me at 13, at the height of my venom! I stopped kissing my mother when I went to bed and when my dad asked why I said “What, is she a lesbian?” That’s what I was like!”

And in fact she does seem more at ease with herself than I’ve heard she was, and very content with her life.

“Brighton, for all its airs and graces, is a very provincial town, and I like it that way. I don’t want to be like a young bunny putting it around, I’m 45 years old, it was never my way anyway, I got married when I was 18 and 24, even though I always admired girls that did. It was never the life for me, to be honest with you.”

She seems content too with her role in the grand scheme of things. “You know that thing you wrote about me [the Sugar Rush review] was so unique, it treated me like a human being which was such a change. I love being round young writers, I like to think of writers as a community, as a race. I’m forty-five years old , I’m not going to write “the great novel”…a dead mother that’s what I’m going to be now, and that’s alright with me.”

Already seriously sozzled before the interview ended (me,anyway) we break off to join her fellow guests – and proceed to drink a lot more. The “mists of Bacchus” descend on my memory somewhat here though I do dimly remember us drivelling on about many other subjects. Indulging in huge, shared, over-emphatic praise of Nye Bevan figured highly. (“Idiots always get him mixed up with Ernest Bevin, the anti-Semitic git.”) At one point Julie has a huge slanging match with Zoe and Gary about the merits of white immigration (Julie is against, she thinks the UK owes black and Asian people a huge debt which doesn’t apply to east Europeans). I recall also being a coward and slinking away during this, talking to Nadia instead. Nadia has clearly seen it a thousand times before, and its clear why Julie loves her so much. She’s fantastic, and clearly the calming, sensible one of the pair. “Don’t worry, she’ll calm down in a few minutes”, I think she said. And she did.

At one point I harangue Julie for wasting her life attacking idiotic celebrities when she could be highlighting great social injustices as she did for a very brief period in her Guardian columns of 2002, campaigning on issues like the still-toothless corporate manslaughter law which allows negligent employers to get away with murder (literally, if not legally.)

She explained she found writing such things too much of an emotional strain, and that it was too late to change now anyway. She was a nasty, witty old hack, pure and simple. And she liked it that way.

And of course; that’s what makes her what she is. The world already has John Pilger. Its precisely the fact she has “run away from her brain” as she herself puts it which makes her so entertaining. A sledgehammer cracking a nut; the spectres of Dorothy Parker and Marx ganging up on straw-celebs like Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas is sometimes just what you need. Can we really imagine a nice campaigning little Julie Burchill? Brrrr. I must have been even more pissed than I imagined.

The day after our meet, amidst the industrial hangover, I reflect on the massive hatred Julie inspires. Two years back she managed to take the number 85 spot in the Channel 4′s “most hated Britons” poll. Not high enough in her view I’m sure. But why was she there? Because of her narcissism, arrogance and self-obsession? I’d hazard a guess she’s not the only columnist to suffer such flaws. She is however one of the very few to openly acknowledge it, sign-post it, flaunt it, and make a very good joke out of it.

Because of extreme opinions, repeating her obsessions? Let’s think of these wonderful creatures we call “columnists”. Richard Littlejohn, Gary Bushell…straight-off bigots peddling the same old poison week after week, and always kicking the weak, never the strong, with far higher readerships too – not on the list. The late-now-but-not-then Lynda Lee-Potter, bitching hideously about celebs throughout her whole career, bigger readership again. Her name’s not down, she’s not coming in. A hundred odd male journalists with just as “messy” private lives as Julie; they don’t get the spawn of Beelzebub treatment either. Could the fact that she can write each one of them into the dirt at least partially explain this bonfire of loathing? I rather think it could. Julie says people who write hatefully about chavs reveal more about themselves than they do of their targets. Perhaps there’s an element of self-identification with that. And perhaps she’s right.

Of course I’m hopelessly, and rather pathetically compromised (there, I’ve said it first) by spending sloshed out time in her charming and generous presence. But I wasn’t disappointed. And long may she rain bile over us.

Chris Hall: First off, congratulations on the birth of your new son, Luther.

Will Self: Yeah, little baby Luther. He was born on August 8, so he’s a couple of months old now.

CH: So I suppose you’ve had people pointing out the Superman connection with your other son Alexis (i.e. Lex Luther)?

WS: Yes… It just arose. In my experience with names, they just arise. I was always quite keen on Dmitri because Alexis and Ivan so with the third one you could have the Brothers Karamazov. But Deborah didn’t think that was funny.

CH: So how do you find the time for all this writing then?

WS: Well, I have cycled back quite a lot this year in that I resigned from the Independent before Luther was born, so it’s the first time in more or less 10 years when I haven’t had an ongoing newspaper contract. So, I took fairly extensive paternity leave. But, you know now it’s building back up again.

CH: No plans for a regular column again?

WS: I don’t think I’m going to take another weekly contract of any kind in the foreseeable future. I’ve got this floating series of interviews with women that I was doing for the Sindie [Independent on Sunday], none of which are in Feeding Frenzy [Amazon] but which will get a book of their own. I must of done 20 to 25 women over the last two to three years but I wanna do about another ten before I pick my best women to put in the book. But, I haven’t found a home for my women yet. I mean, the Independent were happy for me to do them freelance but to be frank I just wasn’t interested.

CH: Why did you only interview women?

WS: I like women! Dammit, I like women!

CH: You gave Margaret Beckett the full treatment didn’t you?

WS: I was very mean to her. And of course you always regret it because I think in interviewing there’s a real sense of ‘did I have a successful bowel movement that morning’ kind of feeling about it isn’t there? You go in to interview someone and you’re constipated and you think they’re the worst person you’ve met and you go in to see them another day when your stomach is full of gaily coloured butterflies and you think they’re the best thing since sliced bread so you grow weary of that as an interviewer if you’ve got any wisdom – but at the same time if dyspepsia collides with something you perceive in the other person you just let rip.

The problem with interviewing, which is an aspect of our culture, is that there seems to be a licence to be psychically ruthless. It’s almost encumbent upon an interviewer to allow themselves the full traverse of the psychic rifle.

CH: And Tracey Emin, who you said was a termagant?

WS: Yeah…you know I kind of resent it when people interview me and assume that, because I’ve been well-known for a fair amount of time, that it’s kind of open season, but the truth of the matter is that Tracey really liked that piece. You have to ask yourself why is that and quite frankly when it comes to Tracey, although one or two of her pieces have a certain odd, jejune quality, her art work is essentially a peg on which she hangs her media persona which is her main work.

So she didn’t mind that piece and I think that that’s what you’re up against with a certain kind of interview subject. Now with Beckett I’m perfectly confident that she really hated and was upset by that piece and I noticed that after it she started to make some very sour comments on the media publicly for quite a while. But you know, she’s a politician, you have to reckon that someone’s going to take down verbatim what you’re saying. Why wouldn’t they?

CH: Do you normally use a tape machine?

WS: Well, I think that’s why the Beckett interview was such a devastating piece because I just transcribed answers to questions. Because she talked such complete bollocks. You know, why bother?

CH: Is one of the attractions to journalism the lack of needing to suspend your disbelief so much?

WS: I think it’s an opportunity to get you out and about. It gets you interacting with the world in all sorts of different ways. It also gives you the opportunity, funnily enough, to suspend disbelief more readily because you’re presented with an area of fact that you can then instantly turn into an area of fiction or at any rate embellish in some way. I’m not making great claims for my journalism but I think that what I do that gives me cachet and makes editors want to employ me is really colour writing, it’s really lifting what otherwise might be fairly dry into something that is quite outlandish sometimes. I suppose I am in some ways a practitioner of gonzo/new journalism in that I am prepared to inject my own warped sensibilities into a piece.

CH: You say that you read very little fiction now, a problem with suspension of disbelief, but do you just mean new fiction or do you really not read the classics?

WS: No, I don’t read classic fiction either.

CH: I was thinking of the Amis line about disparaging your youngers but exalting your elders…

WS: What you mean so you don’t see us nipping at your heels? No, I don’t think that’s the way I think about it, but unlike Martin, I’ve never been a sort of fiction-open person. Martin exists in a perpetual competition of some sort, whereas I’m absolutely convinced that only pets win prizes and I don’t think that literary art is a competition of any sort.

CH: Don’t suppose you saw the Booker prize the other day then?

WS: No. I mean what could you possibly win, apart from cash and the kind of frankly transitory and ephemeral applause of certain kinds?

CH: I suppose there is the argument of reaching out to a wider audience…

WS: You could say that the whole kind of prize giving and the whole Lit Crit newspaper based establishment represents a kind of infotainment service for fiction in that way, and beyond a certain point it doesn’t make a work a great work – it doesn’t really change someone’s life or supply that missing X factor that makes them exponentially increase their involvement with the world or with literature. Those things are not what make a work last. The only thing that makes a work last is lasting. And that again you cannot tell. You can look at countless examples of that, of books that have lasted that you wouldn’t have reckoned on lasting.

I’ve just finished writing a long introductory essay for the Penguin Modern Classics of Junky [Amazon]. I mean who would have thought that Junky, published back in 1953 as a paperback bound back to back with Maurice Helbrant’s Narcotic Agent for 35 cents, a penny dreadful shocker, would become probably the greatest confessional novel about heroin addiction written in the 20th century – and I think undoubtedly so.

CH: That must have something to do with his subsequent notoriety though.

WS: Oh no, I think that even if he’d written nothing else it would still stand.

CH: Junky‘s very hard-boiled isn’t it?

WS: It is, in fact he took Hammett as his model for it.

CH: He wrote that as William Lee didn’t he?

WS: Yes, for a Burroughsian it’s got a lot of sign posts towards later theories and fictional methods that he then took up and practiced through Naked Lunch, etc, but actually it’s a really good book. I make the argument in my essay that it’s one of the great existentialist novels, that it’s on a par with Nausea [Amazon] or The Fall [Amazon].

War and pacifism

CH: Someone was interested in a recent Today essay that defined the boundaries of your pacifism. They wanted to know why this position is marginalised by the media?

WS: Well, I think States depend upon a component of armed force – they depend upon the notion of coercion at some level and it’s very hard to find a state that hasn’t had a standing army or militia of some kind. So I think the notion of armed force and violence is integral to the kind of command-based hierarchies that states have. To paraphrase Dubya, “anyone who isn’t with us is against us”, so if you’re against all armed force you’re going to be necessarily squeezed out of the discourse. It won’t even be conscious, there will be people who simply cannot hear what you’re saying because it’s so inimical to their idea of state authority.

I think this war has rather crystallised my pacifism. I think in the past I was like a lot of people who said I’ve got pacifistic inclination but I’m not a pacifist because what I couldn’t find in my own mind was the answer to that perennial question: ‘Ah, yes, but what would you have done when the Nazis were coming?’ And as someone with Jewish blood I’ve always found that difficult to answer, but the thing with this war which makes it so wrong in so many different ways is.that it exposes that argument about the Nazis as a specious argument, in that it assumes a conditional assumption i.e. that you are in 1939, because it can be answered with a similar kind of conditional question: ‘But hang on a minute, if everyone had been a pacifist in 1914 then the Nazis would never have come to power.’

So that to me pushes up the argument to let’s just be pacifists now. Maybe that’s the adequate moral response to the phenomenon of violence in all the forms – I get really angry in the street like we all do. I’ve now taken to bicycling, so I get cut up on my bicycle and I get absolutely furious because it’s so dangerous. I’m a big guy and I’m a very aggressive guy and I feel tempted to rip open cars doors and pull people out and beat them to a bloody pulp but, hey, I don’t do it. It seems to me that there comes a point in your life as a moral being in society where you decide that violence is not the solution to car incidents so there can be the same kind of decision at a macro level.

CH: But it’s still your first response though; you’re not claiming to not have those thoughts?

WS: Well I think that people who say they don’t even think like that anymore are probably self-deceiving. I think it says somewhere in How The Dead Live [Amazon] that there’s no one as angry as an Occidental Buddhist and there’s nobody less forgiving than a fundamentalist born-again Christian. You have to acknowledge the impulse to violence, to say that it’s completely gone is a dangerous thing.

CH: What would you do with the World Trade Centre site?

WS: Mmm.. I’d be leery of venturing an opinion on that. It seems to me that’s something for the people of Manhattan to decide. It’s a grotesque singularity, the snuffing out of that many lives in one place… it also seems to me that it’s going to be an inevitable equivocation between civic pride and something to do with the symbolism of what has occurred.

CH: Is it true about you doing the new series of Shooting Stars with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer?

WS: Yes, that is true. I’ve replaced Mark Lamarr.

CH: Given that Lamaar became the greasy Fifties throwback, what have they got in store for you?

WS: I can assure people that that has not been my fate. In fact, au contraire, I have become a sinister kind of John Dee-type figure who controls Vic’s mind by use of instantiated eye beams which fiddle with his mind.

CH: This just developed organically?

WS: Yes, it developed organically over the show that Vic, Jim Moir, became convinced that I was controlling his mind. I think I’ve claimed the upper hand there actually… It was a fun show to do not least because it’s pretty good not to take yourself too seriously, and to get paid well for not taking yourself too seriously is a real bonus. I’m not sure how good I’m going to be on it because it’s not quite my humour, it’s not verbally based, it’s very visual humour – they are rubber-legged funny men. I hope it works for their sake, after all it’s not my main gig but it is theirs.

Water, water everywhere

CH: You’ve written of the benefits to the imagination of living near a large body of water. Could this be why you live so close to the Thames, albeit unconsciously?

WS: Mmm, I think with the Thames… Mmm, yeah I suppose that it does help. I hadn’t really considered that aspect of it: it is tidal, it does move. With the Thames I always think that because it’s such a conspicuous piece of physical geography going right through the heart of something that is oppressively human in that way that it annuls or at any rate vitiates the oppressive sense of human geography and provides you with a sense of topography really, because you know you’re next to a river, you know you’re in a river valley, you know you’re on a planet that has natural features whereas if you’re just in the middle of Acton then it’s rather difficult to hang on to -

CH: You’ve got it in for Acton haven’t you?

WS: I’m thinking of moving to Acton actually. That’s why it comes to mind. I concede that the river may have been why I chose to live in Vauxhall. In fact, I was looking at renting as an office, a very unusual house-boaty thing that’s down by Cringle Dock waste disposal station in the lea of Battersea Power Station, which is this weird thing on two great pontoons built by a load of Finnish architectural students. But I just wouldn’t spend enough time on it to make it practical, but the idea of writing on top of a body of water was enormously appealing.

Schzoid sensitivity

CH: On the South Bank Show a few years back you said that a psychologist had put “schizoid personality” on your case notes. Now, this might sound like a conceit from your own fiction, but I got the impression that you might have interpreted this as meaning that you were schizophrenic, but diagnostically it means a personality disorder characterised by “extreme shyness and oversensitivity to others”.

WS: I did know that, but the same diagnosis had borderline personality written down as well which would be another form of that. But, increasingly I’ve come to view addiction itself as a mimetic illness in that way – it mimics other psychopathologies. People who essentially have addictive personalities are diagnosed as manic depressive or schizophrenic or certainly depressive. What they really are is addicts. The addiction decides, if you think of it as an autonomous thing, to pretends to be another pathology because the addict finds it bizzarely more comfortable to think of themselves as schizophrenic or manic depressive or whatever, rather than confront the fact that they are an addict which of course means that they’re going to have to stop doing what they want to do above all.

CH: So are you shy and sensitive?

WS: I think I am still quite shy. A lot of the extroversion or flamboyance is always a compensation. It’s better to tough it out rather than sit there cowering.

CH: Did you retreat from the limelight after being found snorting heroin aboard John Major’s plane during the 1997 election?

WS: No, not at all. Two things happened on that front. One was that I didn’t go to ground which was useful. In fact, I counter-attacked. I rolled with the punch in the initial aftermath. Doing Have I Got News For You was quite frankly a calculated thing to defuse criticism. I think that there’s a certain level at which English or British society operates as a kind of particularly beastly lower sixth form common room. If I’d gone to ground at that point I think I would have been in trouble. And it did serve to defuse interest in it.

The other thing is cleaning up from drugs. It made me less interesting to people in that kind of prurient way. And there’s always that level in the media and society as a whole just as the papers are full of stories about illicit drugs and strange sexual practices so that was the basic voyeuristic level of interest in me as someone who got completely fucked up on drugs and booze. And if you’re not doing that anymore then you’re not vulnerable in that way.

CH: Have you read your brother Jonathan’s book, Self Abuse [Amazon], which is partly about growing up in what he sees as a dysfunctional family. Can you comment?

WS: Well, I can’t. I have read it, but I made a pact with myself not to comment on it publicly because I just don’t do that stuff. What I can say in answer to the question is that there are a lot of factual inaccuracies in it.

CH: The introduction to Feeding Frenzy refers to a cabal of restaurateurs who wanted shot of you saying you’d tried to buy drugs off the doorman of his restaurant…

WS: That was before [the Major incident] of course. That was actually a malevolent restaurateur rather than the tabloids themselves. He was someone who didn’t like the reviews I’d been giving his restaurants.

CH: So there genuinely was this plan to get rid of you?

WS: Oh yeah, that’s true.

CH: A cabal?

WS: Yeah, as far as I know is true as well. That’s not just rhetorical rubbish.

CH: That’s a bit weird isn’t it?

WS: No, it’s not weird. I mean I don’t think it was said with any great seriousness. What I think is, you know what these guys are like, they all sit around getting drunk and think ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could bump off Will Self?’. I don’t think they were serious but it does show you the level of naffness and the extent to which criticism can bite. I remember Deborah pointed out when I said ‘I don’t know why these fucking celebrity egg flippers get so upset about these reviews, you know they go on parceling up three bits of raddicio for £45, why are they bothered?’ and she said ‘Well, some of them really do regard what they do as an art form’

CH: You often just criticised the interior design of the restaurant rather than the food…

WS: Well, these guys, and I do know some of them, aren’t stupid, what they realise is that by concentrating on the restaurant you’re completely dissing the food and the whole culture that they represent in which it’s really important to drizzle olive oil in a particular way. You’re saying that ‘Hang on, this isn’t important’. Not only is it not important it’s a kind of grotesque moral singularity: You’re sitting around thinking about adding huge amounts of monetary value to ingredients that would barely keep a starving Somalian alive for a day. If you start criticising the food you start to take it on its own terms. You can’t allow it that much credence. You’ve suspended disbelief in what’s being done. Whereas my approach was to say ‘I just don’t buy any of this shit’ you know.

Novel uses

CH: I liked the long ‘travel’ piece you wrote in Australia. You’re very much a spiritual person aren’t you?

WS: Yes, when I went to see the whirling dervishes. Yes, I think so. Middle-age tends to afflict us in this way doesn’t it? And I think that cleaning up from drugs necessarily entails a revaluation of the spiritual facet of yourself. In order to shut off an entirely self-destructive way of life you have to look for a positive direction. But I think for people viewing my fictional work it’s always been there. I think that, this is a broad brush, but people tend to mistake me for a nihilist but I’m not really like this at all.

CH: Ballard gets misunderstood in that way too.

WS: Yes, I don’t think people really get what he’s up to in that respect. I think people who do understand, really understand, and people who don’t understand just don’t understand it. I’m unashamed of saying that: that I am more interested in spiritual questions. I’m looking at writing a novel about revealed religion at the moment.

CH: What about the other novel you were writing on ‘land use’?

WS: Yeah, if only I’d written it before foot and mouth. No, I mean what I wanted to do was set something in a rural context and that’s what I will do with this book on revealed religion. It’s not about the farm industry. I’m engaged in rather an odd thing which is that I’m going to turn a screenplay of Dorian Gray that I’ve been writing for about three years back into a novel.

So, I’m basically going to rewrite Oscar Wilde [Amazon], which is something I would have never done off my own back, but having been commissioned to write a screenplay and realising the very strong likelihood that it will never get made, I wanted to make something out of the material I already had.

I’ve transposed Dorian to the gay scene of the 1980s and 90s, into the epicentre of the Aids epidemic and I think it’s an interesting treatment of it and it’ll make an interesting novella. So that’s going to be the next fictional project. The fascinating thing about Dorian is that – I’ll probably get hung, drawn and quartered for this – it’s not actually that great a novel. What it is is an incredibly powerful cultural idea.

Just like the idea that Dorian himself is impervious to time, so the text itself has been impervious to time because in many ways it, rather like a Ballard book – you know he’s one of the very few writers to have been able to foretell the cultural future in that way. Wilde foretold the probable shape of a kind of aggressively “out” gay culture in the 20th century. I think that’s what’s fascinating about Dorian and the way in which gay culture in the late 20th century has become a synechdoche of the narcissism, and media obsession of western culture as a novel, and that’s where I pick up on it today.

CH: So it’s nearing completion?

WS: Err, no. But I would like it to be published some time next year, but when I really get my teeth into something it comes fairly quickly, and it is all there. It just says “Interior. Night. Scene 82. A bar in Greenwich Village.” I have to knock all those out and put it into prose and I’ve got a book hopefully.

CH: Have you been approached by any filmmakers regarding adaptations of your stories?

WS: An amateur made an amateur film of Cock And Bull [Amazon], which he wanted to push commercially, but after seeing it I confess I denied permission for this. In truth, I never would’ve allowed the amateur production to go ahead had he not come on with a sad story about already having spent aeons working on the screenplay. Cock has also been optioned for film twice by the producer Christine Vachon (‘Boys Don’t Cry’) but nothing has come of it, despite my seeing one excellent screenplay written by a guy called Nix (I kid you not). Otherwise, not a single one of the other narratives has been optioned.

CH: Would you be amenable to films made of your work, or do think it might be disastrous?

WS: I think for a writer it’s an almost always an artistic lose-lose scenario. Either you take the money and abrogate all responsibility for the finished article (which then, in all likelihood, ill serves the original), or else you take less money and become creatively involved (if they’ll have you), in which case, in all probability, your participation will be vitiated to the point where it makes no difference anyway. I know several of my peers who have spent years working on film adaptations of their work, only for them either to come out badly, or else not come out at all. Martin Amis has it about right when he says: ‘Don’t believe they’ve made a movie of your book until you rent the video.’ In part, I feel obscurely satisfied that there have been no film adaptations. To my mind it proves that I’m doing something which can only be done in the form of prose fiction. Mind you, the bank manager might well have a different take on this.

CH: Which stories would you be interested in seeing adapted?

WS: I’ve always felt that ‘Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys’ (the story) would make a great British road movie. The problem with road movies in Britain is that there isn’t usually enough road, but by starting in Caithness, on the north coast of Scotland, and having scenes the entire way to London, I think this story avoids the usual pitfalls. I’ve even gone so far as to rough out a scene plan for it, but because of all the problems mentioned above, I’ve never gone any further. I also think ‘The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz’ together with its sequel ‘The Nonce Prize’ would make a good movie. As for the novels, well, Cock would be good (no sight of the genitals – just reaction shots); and Great Apes [Amazon], I feel, could be made quite easily and effectively, by simply having humans play chimpanzees, without any makeup, just half-naked, copulating freely, grooming etc.. And with subtitles (they would sign as in the book).

CH: Which filmmakers would you trust with your work?

WS: Completely trust? Well, Cronenberg for Cock, Gilliam for My Idea of Fun [Amazon] or How the Dead Live.

CH: And finally, what question would you ask yourself?

WS: Erm, I think the question I ask myself most is, and this comes up particularly in relation to this anti-war stuff which is the first public political thing that I’ve put my head above the parapet for kind of ever. So I’d be inclined to ask myself: do you really believe that your work as a writer represents a significant or a meaningful contribution to political and social debate or do you think there’s something more you should be doing? So that’s the kind of question I tend to ask myself most.

Fin

Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald

See all books by W.G. Sebald at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

(Editor’s note: this review was written a couple of weeks prior to W.G. Sebald’s untimely death in a car crash on 14th December 2001).

In its official press release, the committee for the Nobel Prize for Literature praised VS Naipaul, the 2001 recipient, for "works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories". Presumably this is the committee’s mitigation of Naipaul’s notoriously incorrect opinions. Whatever, the statement is curiously ambiguous. On the one hand, it could mean – and probably does mean in this case – the particular stories of Indian and African characters previously ignored in mainstream literature. But it could also mean exactly as it says: "the presence of suppressed histories". Not the histories themselves, only their remnant haunting the language of the victorious.

Suppression is part of the history, and Naipaul’s restrained prose – more English than the English – is paradoxically appropriate: ghosts haunt aged structures. The conservative literary establishment admire the style out of nostalgia, while younger writers like Salman Rushdie reject it out of concern for the future. The latter’s champions will insist that Naipaul’s Nobel elevation signals that we have passed the literary, if not the political, affects of suppression. The only reason to use the inert language of the past is to resist change. Literature is now a pluralism, open to anyone to flood the dark corners of experience with the bright lights of an unfettered imagination. Today, the task of the writer is to keep the shining the lights. Martin Amis calls it "the war against cliché".

On first impression, WG Sebald would seem to be very much inside Naipaul’s encampment. In one long sentence on page four of his new novel Austerlitz, the narrator tries to "conjure up" an image but something else "springs to mind". Hardly the language of the avant-garde. And like Naipaul’s recent novels, there is a tendency toward autobiography and essay, as if resisting the possibilities of the poetic imagination. On page 18, the history of fortress-building around 17th-Century Antwerp is summarised: the place-names, the design theorists, the theories themselves and the futility of the enterprise. We even get a plan of one of the flower-like buildings. No matter how large the fortifications became, we’re told, they drew attention to their weakest point and so invited attack. A metaphor, probably, for this kind of reticent novel. As the story continues through ever new digressions, the weakest point is always its own purpose. Aren’t we missing something? we ask.

No reader of the book can be unaware that the narrator of Austerlitz has a similar background to the author himself. Indeed, in Sebald’s three previous novels, the narrator is much the same sensitive yet dour person. Sebald is a 57-year-old Bavarian long established as a professor of German literature in East Anglia, and the unnamed narrator is an academic who travels throughout Europe on research. He admits there are other reasons for his travelling but, he says, they are "never entirely clear" to him. On a visit to Antwerp, he visits one of the forts used by the Nazis as a detention centre for Resistance fighters during the occupation. As he walks slowly down its sinister tunnels, he recalls tortures described by two actual writers, Jean Améry and Claude Simon, the former having been tortured in the very same fort, the latter having written about a fictional character who suffered like Améry. Again one is tempted to understand this as an indirect reference to what is going on, particularly once the eponymous character of Austerlitz appears.

Jacques Austerlitz is a fellow academic met on one of the narrator’s travels. He was a five-year-old refugee during the Second World War. His parents sent him to Britain as the Nazis closed in on Prague. They didn’t escape. He ended up in provincial Wales, living in a vicarage as Dafydd Elias. It wasn’t until his school days, just before he took some exams, that he was told his real name and origin. Although the narrator is also an exile, he seems to need Austerlitz to act as a conduit for his own search, like a novelist would use a character. Most of the words in the novel are Austerlitz’s, with the narrator adding the occasional "said Austerlitz" to remind us. For the rest of the novel, Austerlitz tells his story, which means the story of his search for the story of his life: "I have never known who I really was" he says.

He tells the narrator that it wasn’t until he had met him that he was able to approach his past. Before then, he says, "an agency greater than or superior to my own capacity for thought, which circumspectly directs operations somewhere in my brain, had always preserved me from my own secret". With the narrator there to listen, the brain’s mechanism is disabled and Austerlitz is finally able to confront the fate of his parents. Mutual need arises out of shared interests. And as a result, there seems to be little difference between Austerlitz and the narrator. In recalling the novel, it is easy to conflate the two. Although this is a common enough thing in reading novels, here the suspension of disbelief is slackened because one is not convinced of the distinction.

Both the narrator and Austerlitz spend time describing events in their lives in which, with curious regularity, they "lose themselves" in reveries of engagement or nauseous confusion. Indeed, it happens in all Sebald’s novels; the first is even titled after such an episode: Vertigo. It’s as if these moments stand in place of the revelations the characters are seeking. For example, Austerlitz loses himself in the small print of works he is reading in a Paris library as he seeks references to his father. He doesn’t find any details but discovers, instead, "the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications" as he calls it. Rather than finding conclusions, the possibilities become almost infinite. He is released, albeit briefly, from his obscure torment. Perhaps this is why the narrator and his friend are so similar: they need just a glimmer of otherness to illuminate their individual darknesses.

We too experience this in the otherwise inexplicable use of photographs and drawings throughout Sebald’s novels. In the many reviews of the novel, very little has been made of them, perhaps it is assumed they are merely illustrative. Yet as they are uncaptioned, the reader instinctively wonders what the connection is between them and the words. It creates one’s own moment of vertigo. This had a tremendous effect in The Emigrants, Sebald’s second novel (though the first to be published). For those new to his work, it will probably have the same affect. However, by this, the fourth time, the power is diminished. Wonder becomes indifference. The same goes for the character of Austerlitz himself. His similarity to the reticent narrator means he is similarly opaque despite speaking for the most of the 418 unparagraphed pages.

Yes, you read correctly. There are 418 pages without a paragraph break. This a famous aspect of the work of the late Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, for whom Sebald has professed great admiration. Bernhard, however, created unforgettable characters even if they seem indistinguishable from the morose author. Perhaps it is significant that not one of Bernhard’s novels are named after the main character (that is, if one understands Wittgenstein’s Nephew as autobiography). It suggests that Sebald’s concern in Austerlitz is for the mystery of suppressed histories, not for attacking the suppression with vituperative glee, like Bernhard. In both uses of unrelenting monologue, the question of what’s being left out is begged. In Bernhard this has a painfully comic affect, while here it is more tragic. Sebald’s empathy is thwarted as a result because, like Austerlitz’s own attempt to get closer to what remains unclear to him, it always produces "varied and impenetrable ramifications". That Austerlitz is an imagined character reasserts the fact, and indicates that the novel as an art form suppresses as much as it illuminates, no matter how much light is beamed into the darkness. The "war against cliché" like the other war it alludes to, is a fighting on the wrong front. Austerlitz’s opacity, then, is perhaps artistically necessary. If this is the case, it makes this novel at once a success – at least on its own terms – and a prelude to an impasse.

With Austerlitz, Sebald has continued a remarkable run. He has produced four fascinating, often mesmerising, novels in almost as many years. They are all far more interesting than those on this year’s Booker Prize shortlist. Yet one wonders how he will continue to dramatise the confrontation with what always resists direct approach without becoming boring and predictable.

No other author in recent years has divided the critics with such relish as Will Self. With, three novellas and two novels to his credit, and now a third collection of short stories, Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys, he has established himself as one of this country’s most inventive and original prose writers.

However, far from accepting suggestions that after being portrayed as the enfant terrible of fictional satire, he now seeks the reward of critical respectability, Self remains as defiant as ever. ‘My work is intentionally divisive. In a way I have failed if I even get to that point. For a satirist to think in those terms would be absolutely ridiculous.’ Certainly, while Self is the main contender to the likes of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Graham Swift, he refuses to think of his writing as aimed at any notion of inclusion , however redundant, within critical tradition of the English literary canon. ‘The role of critics in terms of re-interpreting the novel for subsequent generations, as a blue print, as an analogue of the culture itself is a legitimate view. Yet at the same time writers, like any other artist can fall victim to all forms of vanity in consideration of their own gifts, and one of the chief sources of vanity interestingly is any notion of posterity.’

Clearly Self is walking a tight-rope between his role as writer and literary mediator, between reporter and involved spectator. However, what sets him apart from his contemporaries is the unique perspective his work offers of the pre-millennial era, the (post)modern fin de siecle. His is a fictional world of serial killers, pederasts, and petty bourgeois angst, a mixture of high art and low life which reflects the mundanity and artifice of the contemporary zeitgeist. ‘If you can get a contemporary cultural reference into the book, get away with quoting Richard and Judy and you are confident it is going to stand, then you have done your job, you have translated the contemporary into the timeless.’

It is Self’s willingness to acknowledge his literary inheritance, along with his reference to popular culture as a source of inspiration and ‘immutable intertextuality’, that distances him from the more incestuous and anachronistic impulses of contemporary fiction. Inspired by the likes of Celine, Nietzsche and Dostevesky, he shares with them a rage and revulsion, at what Sartre called society’s ‘self enclosed humanism’ and admits that ‘I was fascinated by the nihilists and consciously styled myself in that way as a destructive intellectual force, in so far as I saw my writing as an extension of that role.’ Like all great authors , Self writes with an overriding sense of his own omnipotence within the realm of his own imagination. Egotistical, maybe, but vain? No. If, as Self admits that ‘as you publish more, the more peculiarly arrogant you become,’ he is also modestly aware of his own limitations.

One of the major criticisms of his work is the way in which he is concerned more with the use of elaborate imagery and excessive metaphor, at the expense of characterisation and plot. Yet it is something that Self is willing to admit to. ‘I think the real problem with my books is the lack of structure. I have great difficulty with plot and I have never got on with character, and have always found them very artificial, and essentially romantic in that way, but I have largely written about ideas, and I view descriptive prose, the metaphorical aspects of the work as part and parcel of the ideas.’

Although some of the stories in the new book, such as ‘The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz’, ‘Dave Too’ and ‘A Story for Europe’ have been published previously in The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis, his style of composition remains consistent – writing very quickly and spontaneously – a technique he developed from his journalism. ‘I don’t think of myself much, or what I am saying, and I am often very surprised by the result.’ It is this immediacy and unpredictability that has become a hallmark of his work. ‘My aim is to write con brio . I have always thought that you can only write one version of a book, and I think that is what hamstrings a lot of people’s approach to the notion of writing as a search for meaning, a pursuit of perfection. But I really suffer with a sense of dissatisfaction with my work. I am not sure if it would help if they were crafted better, I would be a different writer. I am content to remain ragged in that way.’

If critics have pointed to his apparent irreverence and lack of emotional engagement towards the act of writing, he is keen to suggest that ‘ I am fairly mystical about the relationship with the text . . . a posture of humility in relation to your own muse is quite important and my personal feelings I try to keep away from that.’ Unlike what he agrees has become the life blood of contemporary literary discourse: ‘Self-confession as I see it a really decadent syndrome, . . . a crisis of imagination and very depressing.’ While his work is ‘nakedly personal’, he opposes any literalist interpretation of his work, and is intent in distancing himself from the idea that fiction should pandering to the essentially regressive or escapist tendencies of the book reading public. ‘ To think that would be insane, I might as well write Mills and Boon. Every text contains within itself the idea of an objective reading . . those who think there is a subjective reader are full of shit. Just as I am trying to break down my resistance to writing books, so I suppose at the same time, I am trying to break down peoples resistance to reading them. Book’s aren’t life, they are just books.’

Somewhat ironically however, Self is a believer in the text as a non-factual body of words which stems from his early attempts at writing. ‘I had a great deal of difficulty with the feeling that I didn’t have anything to say, that everything had been written already and which really bedevilled me.’ As a result Self has go on to essentially redefine his role as an author. ‘I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form, ‘I think I am merely the midwife in that sense.’

True when you consider that he has delivered some of the most provocative fiction of the last ten years. Self’s stories are ‘ a fundamental assault’ not just on the over indulgent and emotional realism of contemporary fiction, but on ‘the antinomies of organised social living.’ ‘People always say that they are full of sex, and drugs and violence. . . I am not writing Jane Austen, but they are only full of those things in so far as it is necessary for them to mirror what I am trying to describe.’ Believing that a writer should have the courage of his own perversions, Self sees his work as ‘perverse only in the sense of the willingness to look upon the things that other people regard as serious. I regard myself as quite a puritan. I am quite a prudish person.’

The scene however in the concluding story of the new collection, ‘The Nonce Prize’ of a murdered child , the victim of a pederasts, whose dismembered body, dressed only in a Toy Story T-shirt, is bound to attract criticism. Yet for Self, ‘An image like that has a total necessity, the mixing of the mundane with the extremely horrible. Of course it is deliberately shocking’, but what he plays on is our sense of simultaneous aversion and innate attraction to the dark of human nature; the necessity to explore the depths of human potentiality. In a period in which politicians, priests and the press are agonising about how to find a basis for morality, Self’s ideas, lubricious as they seem, are in fact profoundly principled. For the author they represent ‘a chronic jouissance’ which reflects how people are increasingly finding consummate enjoyment within signs of guilt, despair, violence and death. ‘I am alluding to possibilities that we know are actualities. Just as sex and drugs continue to have their own pornography, the focusing of sexual relief into ritualised posture, the need to engage in a constructive relationship with power or with society, with having children or the meaning of generations. All these things seem to be subjected to their own pornography. I hate that about modern society, it is revolting.’

It is motifs such as these that provide the basis to many of the new stories; most readily in the grotesquely implausible ‘Flytopia’ and ‘Caring Sharing.’ Similarly, in the wonderfully conceived ‘Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual’, he welcomes us the ‘terrifyingly tiny world of the urban adulterer’ as throughout his work, Self continues to explore the exigencies that modern mass urban living places on the human psyche and the human body. The city in general, and London in particular, represents a new surface, a new hallucinatory experience, a sublime reincarnation of the horror and wonder at the rapidly shifting nature of the identities and anxieties of his characters and the inconstant historical realities they represent. ‘The idea of the modern urban scape is destructive at a very fundamental level the notion of scale. People’s idea of the city that they are living in is so grossly different from the physical reality that you are actually witnessing. There is a marvellous disparity between what is perceived and what it actually is.’

One of the strength of Self’s work is it’s ‘internally referential’ nature, and in Tough Tough Toys … the same characters often appear in corresponding stories. In doing so Self reinforces the common theme in the collection, ‘what it is to be an adult, about concepts and absences of maturity.’ It is a theme which is echoed in his style, as he plays with different modes, with elements of pastiche and with character for example, while at the same time being meta-critical, commenting on that tendency in his work.

Often surreal, frequently absurd, and always written with a recognisably dark sense of humour, Self’s stories are satiric rather than simply sarcastic. However Self is reluctant to think of himself as a true satirist. ‘The thing I coined in my own mind is that to be an effective satirists is an act of factitiousness, and that includes not talking sensibly about my own work.’ While Self takes his work very seriously, it remains deliberately ambiguous. ‘Taking the world seriously is not given . . . and that is what I am continually trying to get the reader to address . . . but the problem you have got to face is how to suspend disbelief, you have to suspend disbelief in your own work, you have almost got to believe it is true in order to carry it off.’

Since the publication of his first book , ‘The Quantity Theory of Insanity’ in 1991, Will Self continues to be portrayed as very much the archetypal outsider. His admittedly ‘muddled and provisional childhood’, and his former addiction to heroin for example are well documented, yet with the concept of the avant garde as redundant as any notion of a central literary tradition he feels more at home within the mainstream cultural sphere. But does being white, Middle Class and heterosexual leave him creatively isolated, limited in comparison to more recognisably racial and gender specific literary genres? ‘I have never seen myself as a traditional bohemian anyway so I find the notion of being part of an avant garde very hard to imagine, but the great virtue of being middle class in this country is that you are bizarrely anonymous. Your experience is quite commonplace, you become null in that way and in some ways I find myself curiously liberated by it. if I was gay, or black or more Jewish than I am, then it might ghettoise me.’

It is this sense of creative freedom that has allowed Self throughout his career to explore different characters and indulge his passion for different accents and rhythms that make up the modern English language, the health of which he is quick to disassociate from what he sees as the generally parlous condition of the English Novel. ‘One of the great sources of solace in my career is that I no longer have to read fiction . . . I think it is a great help.’ While ‘blissfully unaware ‘ of his contemporaries, he is conscious of the ‘warp and weft’ of the publishing business and the effect this is having on writers ‘This year’s best seller is next year’s out of print writer. But you write a good book now and it will be published. There are so many bad books published that it has to be true!’

Will his next book would be a novel? ‘I could go on writing the books I have been writing. There are enough books to be written like that. Certainly I am not short of fiction. I have enough to last me into the next millennium already sketched out, but I am fed up with these psycho-analysts and artists. I want to write a book about someone who isn’t an intellectual.’ As for philosophy; ‘At best it is sublime, at worst it is opera.’ Equally, Self relies less on the interface of drugs and literature as a source of either personal or thematic motivation. ‘I remain interested in them as a perspective, the capacity for drugs themselves to enhance or mediate, to colour creativity, but I am so conservative in so many other ways it strikes me as faintly absurd.’

Is Will Self mellowing with age. Not a chance. He and his work remain as unpredictable and elusive as ever. For all his honesty and willingness to talk about his work seriously there is a sense that he is reluctant to reveal what he calls ‘the back of the theatre.’ As the curtain rises on his latest production, and critics prepare once more to answer the question of Will Self’s literary importance with customary shouts of “Oh yes he is!”, or “Oh no he isn’t!”, perhaps a more suitable retort would be “He’s behind you!”

Existing somewhere between the manifest edifices of Crash and Empire Of The Sun, the rest of JG Ballard’s fiction glides and grinds like vast tectonic plates. Those already acquainted with Crash, the polar extreme of Ballard’s oeuvre, and his most successful book, the semi-autobiographical work Empire Of The Sun, will find the rest of his work as resonant and thought-provoking as these two novels. With the controversy and critical acclaim that has surrounded David Cronenberg’s film adaptation of Crash, it is about time that the rest of Ballard’s work received a closer look.

I can clearly remember reading my very first Ballard short story, “Track 12″, among a collection of science fiction short stories from the likes of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke et al, all of whom were then part of the English secondary school curriculum. What set Ballard’s story immediately apart, besides its extreme brevity (3 pages – an inspiration to all of us who lazily took up the creed of quality over quantity), was the fusion and overlay of inner and outer landscapes, the public and private colliding and commingling. Here I first glimpsed the compressed economy of Ballard’s writing, as if he were living in a world that would suddenly disappear or be destroyed. Asimov once defined a short story as one in which if you removed just one sentence then the entire story made no sense. “Track 12″ is about as close as anyone will get to adhering to Asimov’s dictum.

Ballard’s narratives would seem to represent a warped inversion of reductio ad absurdum, in which truth, not falsity, is shown through absurd logical consequence. It’s always too late for going back in his fiction; there is a kind of inexorable rush hat draws us towards destruction or transcendence and often, both. (For these reasons, Ballard avoids elliptical plots). The moral ambivalence inherent to a lot of his work is best illustrated in Crash, where Ballard’s own introduction to the novel seems to be a disguised disclaimer. While Ballard himself, off the page, stresses the cautionary nature of his stories, his more apocalyptic novels (High Rise, Concrete Island, The Atrocity Exhibition) have been continually read as showing nihilistic or pessimistic obsession with decay, destruction and disaster.

Far from it. Ballard’s work shows a deep concern with transcendence and the recognition of unconscious forces. As the critic Gregory Stephenson points out, Ballard is subversive in the true sense of the word (“to turn from beneath”) in that he deals with the unconscious mind and its drive to manifest itself through our waking ego-consciousness, in a sense to banish time and space itself.

This resolutely amoral tone has certain biographical and psychoanalytic roots in Ballard’s own history. Ballard originally intended to be a psychiatrist before abandoning his studies in medicine (it is no coincidence that he shares the background with William Burroughs). Moreover, by the time he was 13, he had witnessed every kind of conceivable human horror from a childhood spent interned in Lunghua, Japan. It is as if Ballard has had this imprinted upon his mind, hardwired as the template with which he views the world, filtered through and fused with it. Perhaps for this reason his stories, especially Crash, come across as someone trying to shock themselves with their own fiction.

Martin Amis wrote that Empire Of The Sun “gives shape to what shaped him”. Ballard bears this out: “People brought up in the social democracies of Western Europe have no idea of this kind of savagery.” By the time he was repatriated to England from Japan, Ballard was 15 and the culture shock is still with him. He is always going to have an outsider’s perspective; one that, for example, finds the London suburb of Shepperton where he lives “lunar and abstract” in the summer. Perhaps making his fiction abstract and detached is one way of dealing with such terror.

As a writer Ballard has always been more interested in idea, vision, dream and nightmare than in character (or at least character in the usual sense.) The viewpoint of his fiction is a clinically neutral affair even in first person narration, where it is usually a doctor or a psychologist. Indeed, in this sense, Ballard’s fiction comes closer to being psychoanalytic rather than science fiction. Some of the techniques used in psychoanalysis were partly designed to encourage the patients’ defence mechanisms to emerge. Freud argued that therapists should impose as little of their own personalities as possible by remaining neutral and detached. Crash is like Dr Ballard passively relaying our psychosexual nightmares, listening to our defence mechanisms and checking for common symptomology. Indeed, Crash seems more like an extended short story, where the obsession is allowed to play out in time; a temporally exploded idee fixe. This obsessional quality is evident in a lot of Ballard’s other work. The Drowned World ends with the hero heading South, towards the heat and insanity of the rainforests. The American publishers wanted the hero to head North, because otherwise it was “too negative.” Ballard points out: “But it’s a happy ending. South is where he wants to go. Further. Deeper. South!”

Ballard’s surrealism has a great deal more affinity with pictorial, rather than literary, surrealism. Paul Delvaux’s The Echo features in The Day Of Forever, for example, and Salvador Dali is something of a hero to Ballard, featuring prominently in his books as well as on them. (Dali’s Nuclear Cross adorns my copy of Ballard’s The Terminal Beach, his best collection of short stories.) Max Ernst’s silent forests and swamplands, weathered scenery and gnarled post-apocalyptic detritus are redolent of much of Ballard’s early disaster fiction (The Drowned World, The Drought, The Crystal World) . Strikingly, there is also the similarity with Yve Tanguy’s strange beaches. The point is that along with these surrealists Ballard interested in psychological landscapes, i.e. mindscapes. They are all concerned with the externalisation of the mind’s “iconography”. Even with Empire Of The Sun, or, more recently, Cocaine Nights, his most realistic or naturalistic novels are full of these signature images and recurrent themes.

Ballard’s work is also notable for its internal consistency; the deep themes are recurrent but the details, settings, plots ideas, – the surfaces as it were – are varied. I find it curious that so much modern fiction has aped, say, the style of Martin Amis, but not that of Ballard, who, along with Amis, is the great stylist of postwar English fiction. It would be almost too easy to make a Ballard pastiche with its lexicon of drained pools, disused aerodromes, terminal beaches and aeropsychic time. I suspect the reason is because it works only within an imaginative framework, rather than a parochially realistic one merely concerned with relationships. Truly can we use the adjective Ballardian.

Ballard is none too interested in authorial intrusion either – as he says, “The writer’s task is to invent the reality” (or as Nietzsche put it: “No artist tolerates reality” ) and not the fiction which is all around us – mass merchandising, advertising, politics as advertisement. David Cronenberg, the Canadian director of Crash, bears this out from his reading of the novel: “…it provided you with fantasies you didn’t know you had before. Once they were there, they were real. They made sense.” Only Ballard can come up with a sentence such as “What links the first flight of the Wright Brothers to the invention of the Pill is the social and sexual philosophy of the ejector seat.”

The key to understanding Ballard’s work is in the fusion or overlapping of internal and external worlds. In 1962 he wrote an article for New Worlds magazine entitled Which Way To Inner Space? (collected in A User’s Guide To The Millennium) in which, essentially, he sets out his own manifesto. He despairs of the standard SF “rocket and planet” story and devices such as time travel and telepathy which actually prevent the writer from using his imagination at all. He criticises SF writers for treating time like “a glorified scenic railway”and would like to see it treated as one of the “perspectives of the personality”. Ballard wants SF to become abstract, and specifically, he’d like to see more psycholiterary ideas of science. All in all then, a stylistic and thematic overhaul of SF. Most tellingly of all, he writes that “I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature…(to) be forced to begin again…all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF”. Further, that “no other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future.”

Take the short story “Manhole 69″ for example, where an experiment to eliminate sleep goes horribly wrong and ends with the subjects suffering from catatonic seizures. The central hypothesis of this short story is that the mind cannot endure continual consciousness, particularly self-consciousness, and reacts by shutting down. They could “no longer contain the idea of their own identity”. As in so much of Ballard’s work, we see this inexorable battle between the unconscious and the conscious, with the former characterised as the more primeval and “real” part of ourselves.

Where Crash literalised the term “auto-erotic”, Cocaine Nights does the same for “guilt complex” (note that these are both psychoanalytic terms). Cocaine Nights, Ballard’s most recent novel, is something of a departure; the first half of the book reads like a fairly straightforward detective piece, with none of Ballard’s trademark tampering with space-time or individual psyches. Cocaine Nights’ plot centres on the Spanish resort of Estrella de Mar, where a housefire kills five people, and the subsequent involvement of Charles Prentice, an outsider whose brother Frank has been arrested for murder. Like Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness and indeed Crash, the book is under the spell of an alluring and quite possibly insane visionary figure. In its description if a society hellbent on leisure, Cocaine Nights follows the line of the argument set out in Carol Reed’s The Third Man, where Harry Lime compares the cuckoo clock art that came from the gentile Swiss culture with the decadent and depraved reign of the Borgias that produced da Vinci.

Perhaps the best place to begin with Ballard is his essays – the recent collection A User’s Guide To The Millennium amounts to a varied and imaginative reading of twentieth century iconography: Mein Kampf, Coca-Cola, Dali, Burroughs, Elvis, TV, nuclear weapons. A collection of Ballard’s journalism from the last 25 years, including book reviews, it points to the sheer breadth of his interests and showcases many of the ideas which drive his fiction. Ballard admits to being an assimilator of the “invisible literature” of technical manuals, company reports, journals, etc. Indeed, one of his recommended books of the last five years is the transcripts of black box flight recordings. For Ballard, it’s a telling choice: over the last forty years, his writing has attempted to do the same – to record the moments at which our lives are most at risk both from the world outside and from within ourselves. May his own literature become a little less invisible in the future.

Will Self is the man who brought a whole new meaning to the phrase “mile high club”. Unless you were in a apathy-induced coma during the run-up to the general election, (or living in another country), you can’t have failed to have seen Self’s face plastered over the front page of every newspaper thanks to the fact that he snorted heroin on John Major’s election jet. Self was promptly sacked from his position at The Observer, was refused to be allowed anywhere near Tony Blair and became the subject of frothing tabloid editorials for days afterwards. (For those of you who want to know more, check out LM’s report).

This episode ties in neatly with Self’s already well-honed media persona – a former heroin addict, enfant terrible of the London literary scene, the English successor to American Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, as well as being an acclaimed novelist obsessed with sexual perversity, gratuitous violence and lashings of Class A drugs, author of such works as My Idea Of Fun and The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis. It’s easy to see why Self got the coverage he did: his CV is copy which virtually writes itself.

However, being catapulted from cult fame to tabloid shame is not something Self either desired or required. While it may lend an extra edge to the publication of his new novel Great Apes, there’s no room for accusations of the election jet episode being a calculated publicity stunt; with two children to support and a third on the way, chucking away a £40,000 a year job in the hope of a few more book sales is not an option. However much the press want Self to be the new King Of Gonzo, he’s not accepting the coke-encrusted crown. Self took the heroin because he needed it, like a diabetic needs insulin. It was for medicinal rather than media purposes.

Talking on the eve of the general election which saw a Labour landslide, Self confesses to being “pretty depressed about losing my job – I have a very strong work ethic and journalism gives me a hit of being a working joe. It’s a good way for me to feel ordinary – you get up and engage with the world, you work with people. Unfortunately, I’ve had that rather taken out of my hands,” he says, referring obliquely to recent events. “There is a temptation after something like this to say “Well, fuck you, you fuckers” and to keep churning it out.”

Self’s need to remain a working journalist stems from the intensity of his fictional writing; like his two great influences William Burroughs and JG Ballard, it involves immersing himself within a completely self-constructed world. “It doesn’t matter how committed you are to your fictional work, it really does do strange things to your head if you’re just concentrating on fiction,” Self maintains. “Ultimately it makes people very arrogant even if they are successful at it because it’s so divorced from the real world. It fills your head in that way – you’re sitting there thinking ‘How do I resolve a plot problem and thematically embrace all of western culture’, and someone else is talking about how they couldn’t get the widget off the production line that morning. You can’t link those two worlds.”

It’s Self’s acute connection to reality that allows him to parody it so mercilessly in his writing. Great Apes functions on the premise that its protagonist Simon Dykes awakes one morning to find the world has irretrievably changed; everyone, from his girlfriend to his psychiatrist, has transmogrified into a chimpanzee. Unsurprisingly, Dykes goes humanshit (groan) and Self follows through the ramifications of his story with masterful chimpunity (groan again). Self squarely classifies himself as a satirist, feeding off the tradition of Jonathan Swift – who he considers “the satirist’s Shakespeare” – and the Enlightenment’s fascination with the arrival of the first chimpanzees in Europe in 1699.

“People understood intuitively at that point that to have an animal that was close to human but not human threw into turmoil a whole set of categories about cosmology and the Chain of Being,” he explains. “Swift was the first of a long line of satirists in the eighteenth century to have ape fantasies and construct ape worlds; there’s a Dutch version of it, a German version – it became a very enduring theme. So I’m not so much writing in the tradition of Swift as standing this long tradition of ape fantasies on its head.”

Self’s self-awareness of his own intellectual history and the writers to who have shaped his own work has been intensified by his dual role as both novelist and journalist, putting him in the strange position of regularly coming face to face with his own literary heroes. But he’s ambivalent about the value of such encounters: “Without being blasé it’s not something that appeals to me particularly. I went to interview Ballard for a 1000 word piece for the Standard and wound up talking to him for 4 hours. I really admire his work and had the fantastic, incredible bonus of finding out that he really liked my work too. But that was that. I don’t think we felt the need to meet each other ever again for the rest of our lives, although Ballard said, ‘If people like you had been around in the 60s, I would have got out more, but now it’s too late!’ which I thought was sweet.

“There’s not a lot of point in chasing these personalities,” Self continues, “because what you really love about them is their work – in your teens, when you really are taken by books. Milan Kundera says books are like love affairs and you’ve only got space for about eight major love affairs in your life. I think you’re not likely to be disappointed when you meet your heroes but, by the same token, it’s unlikely to be a great experience.”

Even so, Self concedes that his being commissioned to interview Hunter S. Thompson would probably produce interesting results, and there is still a glimmer of excitement to his voice when he mentions that he might be visiting Burroughs later in the year, having finally received a personal invitation to the author’s home in Lawrence, Kansas. “I’m going to try and go over in August, if he’s still alive. I was quite upset when Ginsberg died. I don’t want to be disrespectful of the dead – mind you, Allen probably thinks he’s still alive – but I was never a great fan of his poetry. But the Beat movement are who I grew up reading about, reading about their lives quite intensively. So it was quite weird hearing he’d died.”

One writer with whom Self does regularly associate is Martin Amis, possibly England’s most celebrated living novelist. Self ‘s attempt at an interview with Amis (reproduced in Junk Mail) turned into something nearer to an open discussion of each other’s work as writers both documenting the state of England at the close of the century. With Amis having already passed through the unasked for role of enfant terrible that Self is now encountering, there is something to the idea that Amis has mapped out some of the territory that Self is now exploring.

“I was thinking about Martin last night,” admits Self, “about the way that our careers run quite parallel in some ways. Money was published in 1984, when Martin was the same age that I am now, maybe a bit younger – and that was his breakthrough novel in a way. He’s always seemed to me to be a writer who’s much more interested in writing than I am . Although my actual prose is heavily larded with intertextual references, I’m somebody who writes without being concerned with the internal mechanics of writing per se – I want to write about philosophy or anthropology or animals, I’m more interested in aiming out and I guess that’s reflected in my journalism.

Martin on the other hand is a bit more weighty and serious and academic than I would wish to be or could ever be. As regards mixing the mandarin and the demotic, I think there is a similiarity between our work, but I think Martin has a slightly embattled view of the Great Unwashed which I don’t really tend to have. I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn here but they’re a scary presence in Martin’s books and I don’t feel they are in mine.”

So does Self feel like he’s a particularly English writer? “I feel more like a English Novelist than I did a few years ago.” he states. “Because I’m half American, when I started publishing I felt more on the cusp, an internationalist. I write with a lot of specific cultural references. Politically and culturally I regard myself as European, but Europe is influenced by America. I align myself with the utopian socialist libertarian tradition of English thought. I am fiercely anti-establishment – ” Self pauses and then wryly adds, “as you no doubt know. I regard myself as culturally English but politically completely disaffected.”

It’s this disaffection that leads Self to wield satire as a scalpel against contemporary politics, just as Swift did. Asked what’ll he’ll be doing on election night, his tone of voice becomes distinctly ominous: “There are no words to describe my contempt for Tony Blair and what he represents,” he blasts. “Obviously, my personal travails have made things a lot lot worse, but even before all of this shit started happening, I was incandescent with anger about what was happening in the election. I’ve even been considering voting Tory – that’s how mad I am., just so when things start fucking up in a year or two I can turn to people when they’re drunk and say, “Yes, I voted Conservative” and watch their faces crumple up.” Self pauses and then grins. “There are a lot of good parties on in town and I think I might just go out and get rat-arsed.”

The importance of names in literature has nowhere been more typified than in recent attempts to pin down the elusive etymology of Beckett’s Godot. Following that farrago you can be sure that the name ‘Godot’ is missing from any parental ‘Book Of Names’ (although I quite like the idea of pregnant women going around stroking their bellies and saying: “Yes, we’re waiting for Godot…”). One can imagine the bewildered child suffering an intolerable identity problem from having his peers forever arguing about what he ‘means.’

To some, ‘Godot’ has a kind of cosmic signifier in the duality ‘God/Eau’. Less Francophile readings have insisted it should scan as ‘Go.dot’, a reference to the mental and physical movement that must result from Existential inertia. Perhaps the least credible suggestion, although the most interesting and curious, comes from a bizarre triangular link between James Joyce’s Ulysses and the Tour de France. Some painstaking (or entirely serendipitous) research has discovered that a French cyclist by the name of, wait for it, Godot, rode through Dublin on the 16th June in the early part of this century, the exact day which Leopold Bloom spends milling around Dublin in Ulysses. To me this has a further curious affinity with the ‘Go.dot’ reading and one of cheery Norman Tebbit’s maxims: on yer bike! Evidence perhaps that Beckett really was a hilarious wag or, simply, a precognitive member of the Tory party?

Charles Dickens was one of the first to really let rip with overblown allusional comic sobriquets and it is in this tradition that a lot of modern and postmodern neologising is entrenched. Writers have always liked a name’s potential to succinctly allude to character and disposition, often spending months deliberating over the final choice. For me, one of the best examples of a truly great fictional name belongs to the central character in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces: Ignatius J. Reilly. The christian name is practically onomatopoeic, suggesting indignation and outrage which, for anyone who has read the book, will almost sound like a definition of our Rabelaisian hero going about his hatred of anything modern. (In a cinema Ignatius loudly proclaims: “This is an abortion!”) There is also the subtle use of the pompous, self-important middle initial that furthers our understanding of the character.

Philip K. Dick’s obsession with duality (probably originating from the fact that his twin sister died when only a few months old) led him to invent some gloriously unlikely names. In Valis one-half of the narrator (as with a lot of Dick’s novels, it is hard to tell) is called Horselover Fat. ‘Philip’ is Greek for ‘lover of horses’; ‘Dick’ is German for ‘Fat’. Similarly, for close watchers of Karaoke by Dennis Potter, the character of Nick Balmer, played by Richard E. Grant, immediately raised suspicion: N. Balmer = Enbalmer, a famous line from deranged Danny the headhunter in the film Withnail And I. Incidentally, this provides further evidence that Dennis Potter (or Pennis Dotter, as A.A. Gill waggish refers to the playwright) was taking the piss with his Channel 4/BBC 2 collaboration. A less subtle form of this codified obscurantism appears in the film Angel Heart, where Robert De Niro plays the character Louis Cyphre, who turn out to be, surprise surprise, Lucifer.

If there is one author who best exemplifies a predilection for names and games of the distinctly literary type it is Vladimir Nabokov. In Bend Sinister there is paronomasias (a ‘verbal plague’ as Nabokov describes it) in Padukgrad where everybody is merely an anagram of everybody else. Nabokov concedes that by their very nature these “delicate markers” will bypass the inattentive reader and that “well-wishers will bring their own symbols and mobiles, and portable radios, to my little party” and concludes that in the end “it is only the author’s private satisfaction that counts.” It was this “wayside murmur” that pleased him the most when rereading his own fiction for the purposes of correction. etc. Nabokov reminds us that reading is a bungee jump (especially first person narratives) where we may become so engrossed in the rush and thrill of the story that we forget we are tethered to the author. Nabokov had a kind of withering, yet paternalistic, disregard for kidding ourselves: he had a fondness for snapping on the ropes and shouting down, “You idiots!”

James Wood, in comparing young American and English writing, recently argued for a fiction of unknowingness and against one of omniscient authorial intrusion. But surely this is just the point that Nabokov is making: fiction is a conscious game where the author manipulates the proceedings. There is little escape from this fact (and why should we want to escape it?) What varies is authorial acknowledgement which sounds patronising or exhilarating, according to taste. Some people don’t like the pedagogical voice in modern fiction, don’t like being ‘lectured to’, and some don’t like being told they’re being ‘lectured to.’ Fine. But Woods, and even more recently, the children’s writer Philip Pullman, recent winner of the Carnegie Medal, goes too far in implying that any type of postmodern or self-conscious position cannot co-exist with what they conceive as a ‘pure storytelling’ form.

I can’t help but detect a very conservative sensibility here that has an analogue with the political rhetoric of the “Back To Basics” government campaign: a return to good honest readability, out with this leftie cleverness, elliptical narrative on yer bike! Note also the tedious cyclical nature inherent to both arguments, roughly appearing in the runup to the Booker Prize or a General Election. A recent Dillons survey of MPs’ reading habits (a thinly veiled attempt to annoy Jeffrey Archer, which is fine by me) reveals similarly conservative reading values. Most overrated novelist? Archer, of course, who goes down for obvious political reasons (though it begs the question: who is it that ‘rated’ him in the first place?) Next came Martin Amis, A.S.Byatt and Salman Rushdie, which sounds suspiciously like a list of people you are supposed to say are overrated. Either that or, dare I say it, a list of authors your average MP is a little too sentence-challenged to understand. Well, think about it: all those years of soundbite politics hardly indicates a love of Proust or Joyce, does it?

The importance of a name to plot structure is nowhere more comically heightened than in Martin Amis’ Money, where John Self finds himself the patsy in a financial conspiracy of moviemakers and money shakers. It is the character’s very name that is the source of his downfall. (Skip the next couple of paragraphs if you haven’t read the book). ‘John’ is, I think, the perfect name for invoking the bland anonymity of the giant financial institutions where, in Nabokovian terms, everybody is merely an anagram of everybody else. (Viz. Nick Leeson: a name that should have set alarm bells ringing in itself).

‘Self’ of course embodies the ultimate Eighties Thatcherite ‘ideas’ of individualism and survival. But the apposite brilliance of ‘John Self ‘ is in making it the central twist. Amis has subservient to the greater scheme of things (the plot), just as his character is made to serve the greed of the players around him. It transpires that Self has been signing company documents twice; once under co-signatory, once under ‘Self’: “It was your name.” This literary playfulness and close attention to detail can be traced from Nabokov through the American heavyweights Saul Bellow and John Updike to Anthony Burgess and most recently Amis.

The playfulness which employs hyperreal and ciphered names runs riot in the comic novel, best exemplified by Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Here the names are neither naturalistic or ciphered but faintly ludicrous (viz. Pulp Fiction:“This is America: names don’t mean shit”). There is a phonetic suggestibility of sedition and subversion in the name ‘Yossarian’ (which is noted by one of his paranoid superiors in the book). There is also the double ‘Major Major’ (which has recently been recycled as the title of Terry Major-Ball’s autobiography) and the sub-Dickensian ‘Chaplain Tapmann’. ‘Milo Minderbinder’ is a personal favourite, conjuring up an image of a kind of entrepreneurial mesmerist who also happens to be mentally ill. However, we also have Richard Ford’s ‘Frank Banscombe’, a name redolent of Updike’s great tragicomic figure Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom: thus a more naturalistic name could be said to suit the subtler pastiche and ironic metiers of Ford and Updike.

Names become their strangest when the demarcations between fiction and reality begin to merge into one another . Umberto Eco is a case in point. His non-fictional name is almost too literary, too good, to be the real name of an author. One of Eco’s short stories from Misreadings is entitled Granita and is a twist upon Lolita, where the subject of desire is an old lady. In the Nabokovian version the central protagonist is, of course, Humbert Humbert, the name once again being indicative of a double or split image. The similarity of Umberto to Humbert is striking, and ‘Eco’` sounds like an allusion to the fact that the first name is an echo of the first. Before knowing any better I found myself thinking that perhaps Will Self was a sly allusion to one of his mentors (and mates) Martin Amis. But that would be to confuse art with life. And we all know where that gets us….