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MARTIN ROWSON'S scratchy endpaper maps for How the Dead Live , perversions of similar apparatus in thePooh books or Swallows

and Amazons , outline the terrain of Will Self's new novel. There's Dulston, between Islington and Hackney, where Lily Bloom moves

when newly dead in 1988. There's Dulburb, its equivalent south of the river. There are insets showing sections of Suffolk, New York

and Australia, and everywhere - bythe Dome, by Canary Wharf, on the Embankment - there is Nowhere, which turns out to be a

chain of theme restaurants recreating outback conditions for jaded metropolitan diners.

The afterlife is a huge concern of literature from its beginnings - and its rebeginnings: modern writing began with Eliot

seeing the Thames in terms of the Styx. Self is also cannibalising his own beginnings and the early story, 'The North London Book

of the Dead'. With his invention of the 'Deathaucracy Office', where you take a number and wait an eternity, he seems to borrow

from another medium, Tim Burton's film, Beetlejuice , which contained the additional refinement that the bureaucracy was staffed

entirely by suicides - those who chose death being required to administer it.

The newly deceased in Burton's film were issued with a handbook explaining the relevant cosmology, for their benefit and ours.

In How the Dead Live, it's not so simple. Lily Bloom has a spirit guide in the shape of theaboriginal Phar Lap, but it takes time for

her new reality to sink in. Her body is restored to plumpness - even her lost teeth are returned to her - but she can't smell or taste

anything. Out of habit, the dead chew, but they spit instead of swallowing. They don't sleep. Smoking becomes a ghost of itself - no

drug effect, no lungs to damage - a sort of placebo addiction.

The rules of the afterlife are confusing (perhaps even to their creator, when the unsmelling heroine describes a shop as 'turmeric-

scented'), its purpose unclear. Lily attends a meeting of a 12-step group for the'personally dead', as if life too was an addiction that

had to be broken, but finds it unhelpful. Her postmortem reality, and the structure of the novel, corresponds more closely to that

other modern division of experience into numbered elements, the five stages of grief. Except that Lily must fully inhabit, and then

let go of, all thenegative emotions built up over a lifetime. Then she can move on, or back.

Lily is American-born (in the 1920s) and Jewish, but Self can't be said to have achieved miracles of impersonation. He gives her two

bad marriages and two nasty daughters; he dutifully sketches in a sort of career for her, designing pens; he lays on the feisty

Yiddish, but her tone of voice and range of reference - theMolesworth books ('as any fule kno'), late Leonard Cohen, Donne's

'The Relic' - seem close to the author's. Many of Lily's observations, on fashions in sunglasses, or the convergence of running shoes

(getting bigger) and cars (getting smaller) - 'Soon people will find themselves inadvertently parking their shoes and putting on their

cars' - read like souped-up newspaper columns.

Every paragraph contains examples of that joky tweaking that gives so much pleasure to the composers of newspaper headlines:

'Schindler's lift', 'Toque of the devil', 'Sobbed by racks', 'Droving away in stays' and so on. Describing the Admiral Duncan bomb

blast, Self itemises the matter pouring into the street: 'straights, queers, the artworks formerly known as prints trousers, carousers

peanuts, penises ' How many times did this experienced novelist reread the phrase 'the artworks formerly known as prints' and still

think it was a good idea, a useful element of fictional technique, to advertise lack of feeling?

Beneath the headlines, Self's style is no less contorted, without even a second-hand immediacy: 'Fleet feet fled through flesh' runs

one sentence. There's a fatal blurring even in relatively straightforward descriptions: 'He was bald save for a horseshoe of brownish

furze, wore a white T-shirt, the trousers from a long-since dismembered suit, and a scowling mien on his crushed, Gladstone face.'

Is wearing a scowling mien on your face really any different from scowling? And hasn't the dictionary meaning of 'furze' - a plant

with yellow flowers and thick, green spines, a synonym for gorse - been supplanted by irrelevant associations, as if it was a

portmanteau word meaning furry fuzz or fuzzy fur?

That Self can do better than this is shown by the 20-odd pages set in Australia. Lily's junkie daughter, Natasha, succumbs to a

visionary spell and so does her maker. The scales fall from his eyes and he is able to render landscape, culture, character again.

Here he risks one of the few purely lyrical sentences in the book, his homage perhaps to the famous passage in Ulysses

about the heaventree of stars hung with humid, nightblue fruit: ' stars which hung from the inky sky like bunches of inconceivably

heavy, lustrous grapes, dusted with the yeast of eternity'. The moment is almost fine enough to survive being repeated word for

word six pages later.

At the heart of the novel is a desire to tackle big themes and extreme situations, coupled with an absolute unwillingness to risk

being uncool. The tone is one of unvarying contempt - not the 'Thirty- two flavours of Baskin-Robbins best nausea' that Lily refers

to, but a dutiful nihilism which over hundreds of pages becomes mysteriously vanilla for lack of anything to contrast with it.

If brown is the new black, then contempt is the new self-pity. Lily's anti-Semitism is a safe outrage, since it is Jewish anti- Semitism,

as is her misogyny since it is female misogyny. A favourite technique of hers, or of Self's, is to despise someone for despising

someone else. Not that the object of the despised person's contempt is ever rehabilitated. It is contempt squared. At one point,

contempt is even cubed, when Lily laments the decline in Jewish anti- Semitism: 'To be a Jew-hating Jew used to mean something,

you could take pride in it but nowadays any cut-about little prick can get away with it.' She's a Jewish Jewish-Jew-hater hater.

Large sweeps of twentieth-century literature, from Celine and Beckett to Thomas Bernhard, have seen theworld in negative terms.

But negativity is no more a qualification in itself than Pollyanna bounciness, if it is used to protect and defend a standard view of

things. A steadfastly scowling mien has no more philosophical validity than a Smiley Face. It may seem a perverse criticism of a

book like How the Dead Live to say that it lacks vitality. But a book about fish doesn't have scales and a book about death needs a

pulse as much as any other, perhaps more than most.

To order How the Dead Live for pounds 12.99 plus 99p p&p, call Observer CultureShop on 0800 3168 171

Illustration

Caption: article-mars-jones.1

Word count: 1160

Copyright Guardian Newspapers, Limited Jun 18, 2000

Indexing (details)Cite

People

Rowson, Martin, Bloom, Lily, Burton, Tim

Company

Canary Wharf

Title

Books: Self, where is thy sting?: The heroine of Will Self's novel is dead. That's not the only reason she lacks vitality: How the Dead

Live by Will SelfBloomsbury pounds 15.99, pp404

Author

Mars-Jones, Adam

Publication title

The Observer

Pages

11

Number of pages

0

Publication year

2000

Publication date

Jun 18, 2000

Year

2000

Section

Observer Review Pages

Publisher

Guardian News & Media Limited

Place of publication

London (UK)

Country of publication

United Kingdom

Publication subject

General Interest Periodicals--Great Britain

ISSN

00297712

Source type

Newspapers

Language of publication

English

Document type

NEWSPAPER

ProQuest document ID

250415035

Document URL

http://search.proquest.com/docview/250415035?accountid=8013

Copyright

Copyright Guardian Newspapers, Limited Jun 18, 2000

Last updated

2012-01-08

Database

ProQuest Central