a Will Self novel is a bit like hearing the man give one of his current Radiotalks an annoying drone which seems halfdetermined to bore you to death, halfanxious to bludgeon you into submission with overwrought wordplay and sententious allusion.
. . until suddenly a flash of brilliance wipes away all the irritation that has gone before, and you begin to think that this man is not only very clever indeed, but also a deep and humane thinker.
Rarely can a writer's habitual literary voice so closely have echoed his actual, physical one,
I think that the selfconscious cleverness, and wearing of one's intellect on the sleeve of one's artfullycrumpled jacket is, for male novelists of my generation at least, something of a neurotic tic, born perhaps of the rise and fall of grammar school education within a short couple of decades.
The concomitant insecurity resultant on a tension between the continued contempt of a moneyed elite towards interlopers on their Oxbridge privileges, and the total incomprehension of the unlettered celebrity culture towards any form of intellectual exertion, has left the middleclass bright white literary boy women and ethnic minority writers still have something to prove to their own peers and a media hungry for novelty, however unjustified that concept might be with a great deal of anxiety.
He feels he has to impress, and resorts to those techniques which got him recognised at school puns, seemingly casual scholarship, outrageous attitudes particularly toward sensitive areas such as race and sex.
Will Self has the added burden of having deliberately placed himself in the line of descent of two deceased greats of the previous generation, Anthony Burgess and JG Ballard both social outsiders in a way that no member of the North London middleclasses could ever be.
He has a lot to prove,
And now I admit that, for all its and its author's faults, I loved this novel, Like I say, the flashes of brilliance, in both perspicacity and style, more than compensated for the rather leaden filler passages full of sixthform wordplay and nudgenudgewinkwink intellectual reference.
It is a story not so much about How the Dead Live although a recent radio talk by the author has cast some light on what he means by this, and also by one of the notions in this book that it's possible for the dead to become 'deader' but rather about how the living do so.
In describing the life of the dead, he points out how like a living death so much of our actual life is, and by extension makes a plea to us to do something about it.
His characters are trapped by their habits his 'dead' protagonist, the appalling Lily Bloom, by nostalgia, regret, bitterness and envy Lily's daughters Charlotte and Natasha by acquisitiveness and heroin addiction respectively.
Lily is an appalling old bat, but Self treats her with humorous respect, and I, for one, found myself liking her, Ditto the cynical, exploitative, but vulnerable Natasha Charlotte is another thing entirely I think it's obvious where her creator's sympathies lay there.
. .
And it's a very funny book, New Age notions of shamanistic wisdom get a proper goingover, and the attitudes to death of most world religions are fairly effectively, even subtly, apostrophised.
I fear I may have become a bornagain Will Self fan,
My next review in these parts will probably deal with the downside of white, middleclass, male British English novelwriting in the lateth/earlyst century.
And I will name names, Not his best, by any stretch, The firstor so pages were amazing, where it might well have stopped and been named "How the Living Die, " The whole book is undeniably wellwritten: unfortunately, Will was kicking the gear while he wrote this, and his delirious mind needed a focus.
I'm glad he's over it, but I didn't need to read his ravings, You're always going to have at least an unusual plot line setting or protagonist in a Self novel and this is no exception.
You're told the story of Lily Bloom as she sees it in life death and rebirth, I often feel with Will Self that there is something brilliant
he is working at but he just misses pulling it off flawlessly.
That isn't to say he isn't worth reading, He definitely is and his use of language even when he stumbles a bit is beautiful, I couldn't put out of my mind how much this is based on his mother's and in turn his life, I think that made it a bit more poignant to me and perhaps made it easier to like Lily flaws and all.
However I think that there is something about Lily and her story that doesn't make her entirely unlikeable while managing to portray her as a true person.
This departure from the usual habit authors have of making Mary Jane characters that people can automatically identify with really drives home what this book is about in part.
If anyone ever comes very close to death with enough time to reflect upon their true natures and their life's paths it all becomes a bit obvious we are all unlikeable in some way.
Self might be a bit off putting to some people but all his books have stuck with me, It is worth the effort to overcome any discomfiture you feel from any of his real or perceived pretensions, For those of us who never noticed it his novels are an incredible treat, I found it really hard to get into How the Dead Live, I just struggled from the outset and as I progressed through the pages it didn't seem to get any better.
I just couldn't gel with the book, despite having a hard time with this the book is very well written and there are interesting elements within it.
Unfortunately this was just not a book that I enjoyed there was just something about it I didn't get and this stopped my enjoyment.
Self is the kind of novelist and journalist whom I consider to be an antifragile, He possesses a high status among leftists par excellence, He's like a priest. He specifically good at making the elites feel guilty about consumption and their peaceful lives,
I enjoyed this book, I didn't particularly find the writing to be out of this world, or something that touched me deeply, it's the man behind the book whom I really like and therefore, enjoy what he conveys through his characters.
Wow. That was horrible. Visceral, cruel, obnoxious. But somehow utterly compelling, hilarious and life affirming, My previous contact with Will Self was from TV, and I guess I expected something more Amis like, and less enthralling, How the Dead Live is about Lily Bloom a chronicle of her late life, her death, and her afterlife, Her major accomplishments in a rather average life are her two daughters, who's lives she follows from death as they spiral in and out of control.
The story is gripping enough alone, but it's raised above that by the detail, the witticisms, the spots of satire, It's absolutely devastating witnessing Lily come to terms with the limits of her life, and even more limiting death, and things don't really improve from there.
But by being so bleak, it helps to highlight the little things we should be thankful for, the fact that boring isn't always a disaster for humanity, and that time wasted on things that matter little, tends to come back to haunt you.
I think I'm a bit stupid for Will Self novels, I really liked the underlying concepts of the book, but this was a hard slog for me, The passages from Christmasin italics, I didn't really understand until at least two thirds of the way through, It felt like it was aboutpages too long, I found myself skipping through the last few chapters as it didn't seem to be adding anything new to the story.
But overall, the idea was an interesting and disturbing one, I'll never pass Dalston without thinking "Dulston" again, Will Self writes great stories, "the book of Dave" is one of my favourite books ever, "How the dead live" is a great story too, detailing the afterlife of one Lilly Bloom, who dies of cancer in her sixties, and continues to eke out an existence in a half hidden, mysterious London Borough.
The problem with Will Self is that he gets a bit tough to read with all his clever wordplay, long words and allusions to this, that and the other, so it can be a bit tiring trying to keep up with him.
There are a few rewards if you persevere though, and if you read on a kindle, it's easy to look stuff up.
I looked up HeLa and was surprised to discover that he hadn't made it up, He had fabricated the idea that it can be used as a wall covering though,
The book is an interesting, if difficult journey with some dark comedy and fascinating ideas, It doesn't actually take you anywhere though, I think that I would rather die than live in line Lilly Bloom, I always run at Will Self books a bit like one of those annoying small yappie dogs that bounces up and down like they're on an invisible bit of elastic.
. . well the ones that aren't now ensconced in expensive handbags anyway,
I do this because my brain always tells me that I love Will Self, . . stupid brain. Why do you always forget I like the idea of liking Will Self and I generally like most of the premises for his twisted tales of course there is always the exception to the rule, this exception being sitelink goodreads. com/review/show/ and he appears on all the pseudo intellectual TV shows that I know I should like/watch/revere but then it all goes a bit wrong from here with the actual reading of the book.
How the Dead Live just didn't stretch it's legs for me, Lily, the aforementioned living dead of the title is not a very engaging woman she's had a tough life, The afterlife is proving to be just as tough because really, rather disappointingly, the afterlife is just life with all the colour drained out of it and all the same morons and issues you surrounded yourself with when you were alive are still there.
Imagine living in a really dull home video of your own life but shot in sepia onmm, This then slowly repeats itself throughout eternity, Well, this is more of less how the dead live, Or Will Self's vision of it anyway, Add to this that all the bits of yourself you shed during life come back to haunt you in a very visual way.
. . all the kilos of fat shed lurch around behind you like a sulky child and if you're a lady ghost apparently tiny ghostly abortions will swirl around your head tethered there like some sort of unpleasant foetal helium filled balloon.
So you're dead but not gone and with the added benefit of an aboriginal spirit guide and the understanding that your end of days is kind of like a final salary pension in reverse.
Right .
I wanted to love this and a tiny bit of my notquitesodeadinside soul did love it, Some of the ideas are clever, Self throws in a broad melange of cultural and crosscultural references and is suitably off the wall but the characterisation just did not grab me.
I can also surmise that when Will Self dies I do not want to go wherever he believes he is going which based on this book, might actually be nowhere but a bedsit in Peckham.
.