Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
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 … 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
BUY Will Self books online from and
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!” �
471
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