In recent times it has become commonplace for writers and critics alike to link contemporary gothic narratives with modern day anxieties. Two recent Gothic novels have successfully exposed our cynical attitude towards love relations and our fear of getting too close to the Other: Dorian by Will Self and Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite. Whilst both books should be celebrated and praised as artistic successes, it is Brite’s novel which is truly the more shocking work, by turning the author herself into the Other. Exquisite Corpse was, I believe, a transgressive act of literary provocation engineered by Brite herself.

In Dorian, Will Self transplants Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to Thatcher’s Britain, following a group of rich, drug-addicted and promiscuous Londoners as their decadent lifestyle leads them into ruin. Self revives Wilde’s classic creation, the pseudo-tragic figure of Henry Wotton. As Wotton dies of AIDS, Self tells us: “Wotton had always understood [t]hat for each minute or hour or day or week of abandonment purchased now, you would have to pay later. Pay with physical dissolution and mental disintegration. On this actuarial basis alone it did not surprise him in the least to wind up dead at forty.” For the cynical Wotton, the body therefore becomes an instrument or a machine with a fixed value, to be squeezed out however fast or slow one wishes.

The main character in Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse gay serial killer, Andrew Compton also contracts HIV, and deals with the news in a similar way: “Well, Andrew, I told myself, anyone who violates the sanctity of a dead boy’s ass cannot expect to get away scot-free.” Unlike Wotton, Compton has no regrets and proceeds to tell himself: “Remember only that this virus in your blood makes people afraid of you. Any time someone is afraid of you, you can use it to your own advantage.” Is it possible that here Brite is making a comment on today’s victim culture? I will return to this idea in a moment.

So what happens to our notions of identity in a victim-obsessed culture, where the body has been reduced to an instrument of pleasure? Dorian opens with an epigraph courtesy of Schopenhauer: “[I]t is true that no one reveals himself as he is; we all wear a mask and play a role.” In our postmodern age of the ‘decentred subject’ it seems that we can never get to know who anyone really ‘is’. In the novel, Self develops this theme by making frequent references to the marriage of Diana Spencer and the Prince of Wales. In Self’s vision of modern Britain, Wotton and his cohorts’ loveless and cynical use of each other’s bodies to pursue solipsistic sexual pleasure is echoed in the equally cynical, loveless charade of the ‘Royal Marriage’.

On the politics of romance, the psychoanalyst, Slavoj Zizek, has recently said in an interview for Spike: “[Y]ou cannot do the game of erotic seduction in politically correct terms. There is a moment of violence, when you say: ‘I love you, I want you.’ In no way can you bypass this violent aspect. So I even think that the fear of sexual harassment in a way includes this aspect, a fear of a too violent, too open encounter with another human being.” Of course, this moment of ‘violence’ is not something that Wotton and his cohorts avoid. They positively revel in promiscuity and group-sex. Yet by doing so, by reducing their bodies to sexual objects, they commit an act of Sartrean mauvaise foi and continue to avoid a truly open encounter with the Other.

The fear of getting too close to the Other is echoed in Brite’s book, too. After being sentenced to life for the sex murders of twenty-three “young men and boys”, the thirty-three year old Compton accidentally encounters and befriends Jay, another serial killer. Unlike Compton, who is ‘merely’ a necrophiliac, Jay is a cannibal. As the two men begin killing young men together, Compton explains why during the original killing spree for which he was imprisoned cannibalism held no appeal: “I was afraid. Unnerved by the thought of walking alone in the dark and still feeling them with me, in my very cells.”

The characters in Dorian remain cynical to the point where the book’s epilogue suggests that the events of the novel are really nothing more than a manuscript. Of course, they really are nothing more than a manuscript, and Self fills the book with various self-referential little twists, many of which are autobiographical (like Wotton, Self is also a graduate of Oxford University who makes no secret of his personal battles with heroin addiction thus raising the question of whether or not the author, through the very act of creating and identifying with his characters, is the ultimate fractured postmodern self).

By contrast, in Exquisite Corpse, Compton is awakened from his cynicism via the act of falling in love with Jay. We realise that this love is genuine when Jay dies and Compton is left aghast, heartbroken. In an entirely sincere act of respect for his Other’s desire, Compton eats a unique packed-lunch: a sandwich filled with Jay’s cooked flesh. As he falls asleep, Compton describes his emotions: “I wanted only to keep Jay’s meat in me as long as I could, to process and assimilate as much of him as possible. When I awoke, he would be with me always.”

Many readers have been repulsed by the explicitly romantic ending of Exquisite Corpse. An executive working for Penguin (up until then, Brite’s UK publisher) wrote to her: “I was very sorry not to feel able to publish it I admired the book’s ambition and [felt it] was a considerable development in your writing. But I did have very considerable reservations about the subject I felt very uncomfortable with the mixture of a [journalistic] approach to the characters and a tendency to see them as admirable, almost vampire-like figures.” (Brite, “The Poetry of Violence”, in Screen Violence edited by Karl French, 1996)

What should be avoided here is the simplistic conclusion that this means Gothic fiction is not the perfect vehicle for dealing with important social issues. Certainly, we are horrified by the idea of a serial killer who, in overcoming his cynicism and falling in love, is more human than us, but this is hardly original; the filmmaker Jean Rollin has made an entire career of presenting us with melancholic tales of lonely, romantic vampires. No, my suspicion is that the problem lies with Poppy Z. Brite’s gender. For many, Brite’s artistic motives are far from transparent: like Self, she often writes hyper-erotic, sometimes gratuitous, descriptions of gay male sex.

Unlike Brite, however, Self’s artistic motives can be easily understood: as a heterosexual man, he is ‘legitimately’ curious about the homosexual Other. This gender discrepancy might lead some readers to unconsciously wonder if Brite is just like Self, but in a different way autobiographically close (if only in terms of fantasy) to her characters. If Lacan is correct to say that we fear the Other because we (wrongly) believe that the Other has a strange, privileged access to jouissance, we might wish to consider the possibility that many readers are suspicious of the jouissance of the female Gothic writer. Recall, for instance, the constant stream of rumours regarding Emily Brontë’s private life (which even includes the suggestion that she buried a dead infant on the Yorkshire moors). I am quite sure that no one is more aware of this than Brite herself and it seems entirely possible that she knew, ahead of submission, the problems Exquisite Corpse would encounter.

Ever since Dickens, we have witnessed the rise of the literary celebrity; and ever since Bridget Jones’ Diary we have watched the rise (dreaded or otherwise) of chick lit. It appears that Brite herself has now abandoned horror writing, whilst her mainstream Other – Anne Rice – continues to pander to her horde of nu-metal-listening fans by churning out one formulaic blockbuster after another. Given the argument I have put forward here, would right now not be the time for another great female horror writer to appear; one who will play to the suspicions of readers regarding the jouissance of the female Gothic writer? Publishing companies take note: this really could be a fantastic opportunity for one of you to make lots and lots of money.

Or am I just being cynical?

Listeners of Radio 4′s Today programme recently voted London’s M25 the worst of the “seven horrors of Britain” in a poll. One imagines that this refers to their experience of it as drivers; but perhaps if they’d done what the novelist, poet and “psychogeographer” Iain Sinclair did and walked around the M25, they’d have thought differently. For this was his unique project – to walk anti-clockwise around the motorway and the areas that it enclosed from Waltham Abbey, exploring the huge tranches of unknown territory that lay bounded by the M25 outside of the city centre. And in doing so, comprehending the scale of the invasion of commerce in these zones and witnessing, as it were, an invisible landscape disappear.

Sinclair describes the journey – taken in the millennial year – in his new book London Orbital. Most people would of course regard the idea of circumnavigating the M25 as a mad one, but was it really that dispiriting? “Not at all. The experience of doing it was incredibly exhilarating,” says Sinclair. “You didn’t know what you were going to find. Getting up really early in this weird landscape. You might as well have been in some totally remote country.”

It is the disconnection between our apprehension of London and its actual topography that Sinclair writes about. (As Will Self puts it: Londoners don’t live in London, they live in the tube map of London). London Orbital is full of developments that airbrush or ignore the history of their sites. Places like Enfield Island Village, described as “an exciting new village community”, of which Sinclair writes: “The village isn’t new, the community isn’t new, the island isn’t new. What’s new is the tariff, the mortgage, the terms of the social contract. What’s new is that industrial debris is suddenly ‘stylish’.”

So what does he think about the housing forecasts for the South East, the recommendations of the Urban Task Force report, and the colossal amount of brownfield renewal that is necessary in and around the capital? “These seem to be projections made from a very privileged metropolitan standpoint about something that’s going to happen ‘out there’, without true knowledge of just what actually is out there,” he says. “The notion of decanting swathes of the populace into these amorphous nowheres, these liminal territories at the edge of the city is, I think, a nightmare prospect.”

This, as London Orbital makes clear, is precisely what the city has always done with its undesirables and madmen. Sinclair – an altogether different kind of asylum seeker, but nonetheless wandering around, not knowing entirely where he is – says that he was amazed to find the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s hypothesis about the optimum distance that asylums should be placed away from the city – 20 miles – so palpably confirmed.

“I was dazzled by the Holloway Sanitarium [now Virginia Park] – the ultimate heritage- asylum conversion,” he tells me. “The thing that disturbed me [about other asylum conversions] was the absence of memory – all traces of what had been there before had been cannily erased, including the name.”

So should architects be learning more about the history of a site? “They should be made to go into the landscape to the site and then move outwards from it for a considerable distance and then to come in on it. Especially the big-name architects who are the worse perpetrators,” he says with a little glee. “They shouldn’t just place something that is simply site-specific to the person commissioning the building.”

As you might expect of Sinclair, he’s unearthed some pretty fascinating nuggets. For example, the story of how the war cabinet was deceived into giving approval for Heathrow airport: “Emergency wartime powers were used to establish, by a network of dubious commercial deals, a major airport that was only 15 miles from the centre of London.” And finding the grave of Hawksmoor in a field just off the motorway was, he says, “quite a shock – this sense of the centre drifting out as it becomes forgotten”.

Were there any new buildings that he particularly admired? “I was very struck by the Siebel building by Runnymede Bridge in Egham. It just appeared out of nowhere between visits. It didn’t bristle with surveillance – most buildings were incredibly paranoid. It seemed transcendantly strange – there was nobody around. It was sinisterly benign.”

Sinclair’s poetic retains that characteristic samizdat quality of goods smuggled past the PR checkpoints, his prose always crackling with connectivity. Here he is on the Xerox building: “Uxbridge is made from Xs. Lines of cancelled typescript. Fields planted with barbed wire.”

One of the many treats of Sinclair’s excellent Lights Out For The Territory (of which London Orbital is a kind of sequel), is his visit to Jeffrey Archer and his penthouse at Alembic House. I wondered if he’d thought of returning to him at his new residence in Belmarsh prison in Thamesmead, south-east London? He laughs at the idea, but admits slightly wearily that “perhaps we’ve had a little too much of him already”.

As for these liminal areas, he’s already looking ahead. “One day, when the research and development has moved elsewhere, the abandoned colony will be turned over to the heritage industry. Wild nature… will be promoted and paraded.” How apt this convergence of Sinclair’s journey with London – to have returned to the beginning.

[This article was originally written for the UK architectural magazine Building Design].

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the first things that happens to Lily is that she squints down “and there, pirouetting between my knees, is a tiny grey manikin. It’s no more than a couple of inches high and has the aspect of a foetus, but a foetus of around 20 years of age.” Lily’s spirit guide, Phar Lap Dixon -a terse and gnomic aboriginal man – explains that it is a lithopedion, a “little dead fossil baby of yours, yeh-hey!?” The idea for the lithopedion, explains Self, comes from “a bizarre transmogrification of a story called ‘Caring, Sharing’ where people have these giant, half-children called emotos who look after them and carry them around. Just as much as you internalise the parent, so you externalise the child.”

I ask him about the novel’s fantastically bleak ending, where Lily is reincarnated as her junky daughter’s junky daughter. “Yes, it’s certainly not up and light is it?” he says mockingly, drawing hard on a white filtered cigarette. “The end acquires this ineluctable and dangerous feeling logic that did surprise me. I hope people will feel that the back end of the novel is like a whirlpool, like some Edgar Alan Poe story dragging you in.

“There was this case, a tragic, tragic case, of this toddler who was discovered to have starved to death because her parents had taken heroin overdoses, and I was really shocked by this case. But I have to say that the student and practitioner of Grand Guignol that I am of course filed it away for a future story.” Do you mean consciously? “Yes. I was talking to Martin Amis about this case, and I said it would be interesting to write about it from the child’s point of view, and Martin said ‘Ah, yes’ with a gleam in his eyes – because he’s a great one for thieving ideas himself – and he said ‘But how would you do it?’ and I hadn’t thought of that particular form of ending until I was two-thirds of the way through. That’s the great thing about being a writer, you file these things away and there’s this amazing moment when you realise why you filed it away. It seems like serendipity, but in fact it gives a purposiveness and a plotiness to your own work.”

In one of the more bizarre reviews of How The Dead Live, Self has been criticised – among all the usual gubbins about being “negative” and obtuse – for not being lyrical. Would he agree? “I think I often see it as being intolerably precious, actually. There’s a whole swathe of” – and he pronounces the next two words as if they were something unpleasant leaving his mouth – “English literature that is shite, precisely because of that. It’s overly precious, and it tries to talk about contemporary life using models of the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter, at all levels of the text, that are derived form archaic forms rather than being absolutely present and imminent in the way that we perceive the world now.”

Self has also just finished a three-year stint writing a column for the weekly architectural journal Building Design, in which he has addressed, among other things, how we perceive the built environment today. Ellipsis has just published more than 60 of those columns in Sore Sites. Why did a high-profile novelist write for a relatively obscure trade journal in the first place? “Well, I was asked by the incoming editor of Building Design who had a brief to bring in someone to reflect back to the architectural profession on how lay people view them and their work, and that just seemed like a really interesting idea to me,” before self-depracatingly adding: “It was also an opportunity to once again get the old rotrings out and do my egregiously bad and amateurish cartoons.”

In fact, as a look through a collection of his cartoons in 1985 for the New Statesman called Slump will reveal, while he is no Ralph Steadman or Gary Larson, he is being unduly modest about his self-taught cartooning skills. Slump is a witty, charming and caustic look at life through the lens of a man who decides never to leave his bed.

One of the pieces that Self wrote for Building Design, and which is not collected in Sore Sites, was an obituary of his father Professor Peter Self, one of the founding members of the Town & Planning Association, written just hours after his death in Canberra, Australia. “Some readers may feel that it’s either macabre or insensitive for me to be writing this within two hours of his death, but believe me,” wrote Self revealingly, “it’s what he would have wanted. Wanted because he raised me first and foremost to be a thinker, then secondly a pedagogue, and lastly a writer.” Self omitted the piece partly because he’s had some problems with memorialising people before. “It’s a funny business, you’re not quite sure how to do it, and in what context it’s appropriate.”

He says that there is some bad blood between him and his American publisher, The Grove Press, over having his introduction to “The Book Of Revelation” dropped because it wanted another writer. (It was originally published in Britain by Canongate.) Self’s intro was a memorial to his friend Ben Trainin who died aged just 28 in 1985. He hesitates, before going on to say: “To be honest, Ben’s oldest sister wasn’t happy with it, and maybe I should have been more sensitive to her feelings about it. On the other hand, I don’t feel it was in any way a traduction or a cheapening of his memory at all. On the contrary, I thought it was a felt and important memorial to a really quite remarkable man.”

Apropos the new novel, can we see a foreshadowing of things in the following passage from the introduction to Revelation? “Funny how the dead get deader. Ben was dead from the moment he died, but five years after his death he was deader, and now he’s deader still. I know this because of the anachronistic quality of my vision of him.”

Self was due to meet William Burroughs, just months before he died in 1997. Is he upset that he never met one of his favourite authors? “There was a plan to meet with Burroughs, but I’m not too bothered about it though. I mean, the poor guy was turned into a bit of a Salvador Dali figure in the last years of his life,” he says sadly. “But of course the great thing about literature is that quite a personal psychic communion exists between the text and the reader. You just don’t have to meet the author.” (Though try telling that to Martin Amis who once fled for his life after a callow fan by the name of, ahem, Will Self chased him down the street!)

Does he read any “invisible literature” in JG Ballard’s phrase? “Oh, what Black Box Flight Recordings? I don’t want to read that. I’m terrified of flying at the moment,” he says anxiously. “But, no, I don’t find the poetic at quite that level. I love reading books about a fact, whatever that fact may be.

“I get to read a lot of non-fiction for reviewing, and I enjoy it. I don’t feel unsustained,” he says, marvelling at how his contemporaries say that they read so much new fiction, which he has little interest in. “Of course, like all of us, I feel that I should be re-reading Proust,” he admits. “I considered doing this project that the telly people have been on at me to do – a history of the 20th century novel [one that Amis turned down, incidentally]. The idea that appeals is the excuse to re-read, or read for the first time, an immense number of 20th century novels.”

In David Lodge’s Small World a writer discovers through a computer program that the most common “lexical” word in his oeuvre is “greasy”. What does Self think an analysis of his new novel would come up with? “Well, in The Quantity Theory Of Insanity one critic said that ‘subcutaneous’ came up a lot,” he answers, before deciding what it would be. “In How The Dead Live the characters are always warbling, as if there’s some sort of infernal chorus of grey doves.”

Ah yes, grey… It turns out that Self is colour blind to an extent. “I see colours at a much reduced level of discrimination, and then I can’t identify them solus either. It’s pretty awful. I found out at school, but I didn’t realise how radical it was until recently when my wife, who has such a fine eye for colour, spotted just how bad it is. It’s just not a very salient thing for me,” he admits. “If you noticed in my books there aren’t really any colours in them.”

Of course, the title of one of his collections of short stories, Grey Area, obviously leaps to mind here, and also his interest in structure and form as opposed to surface detail. Also, at the end of How The Dead Live, Lily gives a long series of synonyms for grey: “If I’d had the opportunity I never would’ve called anything ‘grey’ again on this go-round. Oh no, it would’ve been canescent, griseous, dove-grey, pearl-grey, cinereous, fuliginous, or écru”. Could it be, perhaps, that this very lack of colour discrimination has meant that Self’s eye has, far more than most writers, adapted to the dark lens of London’s drab facade, its inhabitants as well as its built environment. As Lily says: “London, where people are still so fucking reserved, so polite, so hidden behind gauzy indifference. Their politeness is killing me.”

Earlier in the summer this year, Self agreed to become an “art exhibit” at the Fig 1 gallery in central London. He was sat at an architect’s desk with a laptop, wearing wraparound shades, and having his words projected on to a plasma screen behind him while a small audience watched. “If anyone’s got a problem with writer’s block that’s the way to cure it,” he says with total confidence. “You’re sitting there with 30 to 40 people with nothing to do but write, and a necessity to entertain them. The word rate goes up from 300-500 words an hour to about 1,000 words an hour – a colossal production.”

So was he happy with the end result? “It has a certain charm, but I’m not sure I’d like it classed with my works that are constructed, as it were, in tranquillity. My publishers are farting around at the moment but they will bring it out in a kind of lavishly tooled arty farty volume.”

There are plans to repeat the exercise with some modifications in America next year. The main problem it seemed was that people treated it a little too reverently, and so two-way mirrors are being considered, as well as directional mikes. “I had hoped people would come in and talk among themselves, and that I could lig their dialogue and build things up a bit, but the gallery atmosphere intimidated them a bit. But the main aim, which was to yank the writer back into the situation of being a storyteller in the immediate present, sort of worked.”

Although Self says that it was an interesting exercise, there was a particularly unsettling moment during the five days that he was there. “One evening I’d written at great length about this Chinese girl who was there, and of course she disappeared; but by then she’d become quite a major character who then reappeared again towards the end of the day. When I was leaving she button-holed me outside the gallery along with a posse of other people, all of whom I recognised as being characters in my story, and said ‘Come for a drink with me’ – I reared back and she said ‘Oh, I suppose you find it really disturbing to have to come and have a drink with one of your characters?’ And it certainly was. And I didn’t do it!”

Of the Internet as anything other than a high-speed research tool and messaging system, Self says that he is uninterested. “McLuhan was wrong, the medium isn’t the message. It’s another device that allows one to suspend one’s disbelief.” Another fact that could almost be a conceit in his own fiction is that Self’s name is “semantically camouflaged” as far as the internet is concerned. Indeed, most search engines will discard the “Will” leaving you with a list of self-help books, etc. On the subject of his name, which a lot of people still seem to think is a nom de plume, Self tells me that if you look at the credits of old “Batman” episodes you’ll see that the producer was none other than William Self.

Indeed, Self continues to crop up in similarly obscure areas of TV: “I’ve been in the credits of ‘Brass Eye’, ‘The Day Today’ – ‘horse ripping by Will Self’,” he says proudly, being a big fan of Chris Morris. Is that horse in the sense I think it is (heroin)? “It could be, knowing Chris. I hadn’t thought of that actually.” He even gets a mention in “Father Ted” as someone who reads Brick magazine.

For anyone who saw the Channel 4 discussion programme “Something of the Night” (re Ann Widdecombe’s comment about ex-home secretary Michael Howard) with Self presenting, he says that it’ll be the last time he does anything like it again: “It was ill-advised. The anchor role really vitiates against being radical or presenting an alternative voice.” Which is a shame in a way because, for all Self’s obvious discomfort, it was very entertaining to have him try and steer a path between voices as diverse as Martin Amis, Paul Johnson and Tracey Emin (who was embarrassingly drunk for the second time in as many weeks on a TV programme).

As anyone who saw “Room 101″ on BBC2 recently, in which celebrities get to nominate their pet hates for eternal banishment, it will come as little surprise to learn that Self’s hatred of logos and branding has extended even to his own car, a Volvo 360 turbo, from which he removed all of the Volvo insignia in an attempt as it were to be left with the Platonic ideal of a car. “Perhaps I’m becoming insidiously less radical but I’ve failed to take any of the identification tags off the new one,” he says, slightly annoyed with himself. “It really looks like a Volvo. I must get that done, actually.”

As for the future (apart from taking a screwdriver to his latest family vehicle that is), Self says “there are long lain plans to turn ‘The Rock of Crack As Big As The Ritz’ [a short story from Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys] into a kind of… reggae opera. Not staged,” he hurriedly explains as he sees my bemusement, “but as an album! I’ve got two friends who are excellent reggae musicians and producers who’ve worked on a five minute section of the text and have done great work with it.” If the result is anything as good as the track “5ml barrel”, his collaboration with Bomb The Bass, outtakes from the short story “Scale” from Grey Area, then it should be worth the wait. And if all that sounds unlikely, his next book, he says with a straight face, will cover postwar farming history: “A classical novel about land use.”

© Chris Hall 2000

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In his new collection of short stories, Will Self once more welcomes us to the terrifyingly trenchant world of the literary recusant. With his usual irreverent wit and unrestrained surrealism, Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys sees Self move from the ridiculous to the downright absurd through a mixture of high art and low life, leaving in his wake a darkly satirical collage of contemporary fiction.

The opening story is a case in point. A pastiche of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s satirical fantasy on the power of money, ‘The Rock Of Crack As Big As The Ritz’ shows Danny, a former Yardie, finding a seam of crack cocaine running beneath his north London home. Self then takes us into a post-modernist underworld where the lust for the ‘sumptuary and sensual proclivities’ afforded by pin-striped merchant bankers and irreligious Iranians only ends in the book’s concluding story ‘The Nonce Prize’, which sees Danny’s wrongful imprisonment for the murder of a child and his redemption as an aspiring author.

Both stories, part of a trilogy with Self’s earlier novella ‘The Sweet Smell of Psychosis’, offer a strangely nonsensical and at times a frankly disturbing insight into the criminal milieu of drug pushers, prostitutes and pederasts. His vision is saved from accusations of bad taste by virtue of his ability to tally the abstruse with the abstract without subtracting from an underlying sense of his own moral responsibility. Indeed, Self portrays what he sees as the contemporary mal du siécle , albeit with a profound sense of his own authorial impunity and comic sophisticality.

‘Flytopia’, for example, is a pestilential domestic horror in which the hero wakes up to find his house run by socially conversant insects. In ‘Dave Too’, Self examines the nature of identity and anxiety within an ultramonistic world inhabited solely by people named Dave. ‘A Story for Europe’ is another typically absurd piece of meta-psychosis where a German banker suffers a stroke that leaves him a gibbering wreck while Humphy, a rather precocious child of two, develops a gift for speaking business German.

What links the stories together is Self’s own fear of what he sees as the repression of individuality the of the modern where people feel peripheral even to themselves. The ideas are sometimes weakened by the absence of character and plot, a problem that Self readily admits, Indeed, the problem is exacerbated, as in some of his earlier work, by their method of structure, the centring of his prose around a joke, an extended gag which at times fails to carry the ideas that lay behind it let alone raise a smile. In ‘Caring, Sharing’, tiny neurotic adults are pandered to by giant sexually active children, as Self attempts to satirise what he sees as the fetishisation of childhood and the confusion of generations by the effects of liberal parenting. The interplay of symbol and reality lacks sufficient substance to provide the foundation for effective satire, and to be able to suspend disbelief long enough before thinking ‘what’s the point?’ rather than ‘What is in an id?’

However, when Self gets it right, and exploits his talent for combining the preposterous and the personal, he produces some of his most provocative and at times poignant fiction to date. The book’s title story is a picaresque road movie that leaves the familiar grey area of London when the baldly figured character of Bill Bywater experiences a lack of engagement with the reality of the outside world. Slowly absorbed into the body of his car in an existential drama that leads him finally to turn into a non-existent lay-by, he is then resurrected in the contrastingly prequencial ‘Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual.’ In a further inspired piece of intertextuality, Self creates a paranoid vision of the urban adulator based on Freud’s theory that ‘everyone hides the truth in matters of sex,’ as Bill’s obsession with the doll like figure of his mistress and subsequent guilt is writ large across the child-like libido of the male psyche.

This provides the central theme and creative dynamics of the book itself as Will Self continues to toy with our imaginations, playing with different modes of narrative perspective and thematic ideation. Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys is a collection of stories which far from being simply frivolous, offers a seriously unconventional view of life in an age when apparently only the most earnestly self- admissive of writers are viewed with importance. Indeed, if “life is a dream which keeps us from sleeping”, as Self quotes Oscar Wilde in the book’s epigram, then this book will keep you awake for hours.

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!”

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….