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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 ideal-
BUY Will Self books online from and
ist.” 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 perennial 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?”,
465
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