Dead Dead Good (How the Dead Live - Will Self)

Member Name: tim_russell

Product:	How the Dead Live - Will Self
Date:	08/08/01 (95 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Imaginative, moving, funny

Disadvantages: Occasionally confusing

As with Martin Amis, everyone has an opinion on Will Self, whether they've ever read his work or not. For every reader who delights at his surreal imagination, his dazzlingly intellectual use of language and the swaggering, almost insane joy with which he writes, there's several more who think he's a pretentious ex-junkie who writes controversial novels that nobody reads.

Very much the loud, rebellious Stones to Amis' equally talented but rather more conventional Beatles, Self is known more for his extra-curricular activities - taking heroin on John Major's private jet during the '97 election, numerous TV/radio appearances, hanging out with Damien Hirst & Tracey Emin - than he is for his novels, which is a shame, as he is a quite brilliant satirist and the closest thing the 21st century has to another Jonathan Swift.

His latest novel, "How The Dead Live", is basically the full fruition of "The North London Book Of The Dead", which originally appeared in his debut short story collection "The Quantity Theory Of Insanity". The basic premise is, what happens to people when they die? The answer is - nothing. They carry on pretty much as before in a kind of parallel world which is invisible yet all around us.

The narrator is Lily Bloom, a chain-smoking, hard-drinking blowzy old cow who, having died of cancer, finds herself living in Dulston, London's district of the dead. Accompanied by a calcified foetus, her dead, constantly swearing 9-yr old, and 3 creatures born from her discarded fat, she has to adapt to living as a dead person and being unable to interact with the living. So she is able to observe her daughter & son-in-law's attempts to conceive, and her other daughter's decline into heroin-fuelled prostitution, before she decides that being dead is not for her and that reincarnation is what she wants.

As in his previous novel "Great Apes", Self sets up a
surreal yet totally recognisable parallel universe where life is as dull and repetitive as our own, despite being populated by dead people. Lily's soliloquies are used to mock some of the more absurd aspects of modern life - combat trousers, the work ethic, mobile 'phones being just three examples. There are several nice touches of imagination - the dead, who need no food, cannot break the habit of eating and so carry buckets with them in which to regurgitate their food; they find that drinking and regurgitating alcohol still gets them drunk; they can smoke like chimneys and not get ill because, of course, they're already dead. Self's imagination runs riot and the book was clearly as much fun to write as it is to read.

The book is also a very poignant look at illness, death and our inability to alter the paths of other people's lives and our own pasts, and it has a bigger emotional impact that any of Self's previous books. He is clearly maturing as a writer, and is now using his fearsome command of language to develop his imaginative themes rather than as an end in itself. Rather than the literary enfant terrible of old, he now comes across as a mixture of 18th-century moralist (Swift, for example) and 20th-century surrealist (Vonnegut, say), and is fast becoming our most important literary figure.

Summary: