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Interview [published October 2000]
Will Self: Dead Man Talking
Chris Hall has a lively conversation with Will Self
Although, at 39, Will Self is approaching mid-life and
he can see the “lowering storm of age and extinction”
ahead of him, there is still certainly nothing in his
prose or his physiognomy to suggest that he will become
flabby or paunchy. Indeed, even though his new
novel How The Dead Live is divided up into sections
of ‘Dying’, ‘Dead’ and ‘Deader’, Self has if anything
attacked the page with even more vigour and purpose
than before.
So it’s rather reassuring to see Self looking very
healthy, tanned as he is from a holiday in the Canaries,
reassuring also that the Coke he orders comes
in a glass with ice. We meet at the Groucho Club in
Soho, London, one of Self’s former haunts but which
he says he hardly ever visits anymore. Outside he
crouches down to chain his 22cc Go-Ped Bigfoot –
a small motorised scooter – and strides into the bar
wearing a black leather jacket, crisp white shirt and a
pair of well-worn brown Chelsea boots to go with his
new cropped haircut.
How The Dead Live is a mordant and disturbing
allegory of life after death and death in life, which
BUY Will Self books online from and
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
464
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