How do the dead live? Much like the living, in the strange imagination of Will Self. They potter around suburban London, in places called Dulston and Dulberb; they go shopping, do administrative work, and pretend to eat or (inevitably) to take drugs. We have been here before, in his short story “The North London Book of the Dead”, in which the narrator’s Jewish mother ended up in Crouch End, living a life not far removed from our own. In Will Self’s fiction, we don’t learn much about death, but we do learn how deathly he thinks the lives of the living are.
The heroine of How The Dead Live is Lily Bloom. (The name, like many of Self’s names, places, products and phrases, is overdetermined.) Lily, an American, anti-Semitic Jewess, faces the end of her life without much serenity. Cancerous and cantankerous, fat and toothless, she looks back on two failed marriages, one dead son, and two living daughters; one a loathsome junkie, Natasha, one (far worse) a middle-class snob, Charlotte. Lily doesn’t have a good word for anyone or anything, though she has a number of bad ones. And we see her at various points of her life and death; flashbacks to a past that has embraced several decades of history (mostly reduced to a list of fashion mistakes and political brutalities), an extended account of her final graceless surrender to cancer, and the strange purgatory that follows.
Lily is haunted in the afterlife: haunted by memories; haunted by her recollections of physical desire (for sex and food, in gross quantities); haunted by her dead son; haunted by her “lithopedion”, a calcified foetus she has been unknowingly carrying since 1967. (The lithopedion spends much of its time singing pop songs. We are told that its “hokey youthspeak” dates from 1967, yet its favourite songs are almost entirely from the 1970s. Why the 1980s passed the little creature by is hard to say; unlike the narrator of “The North London Book of the Dead”, who was “still trying to look for the gaping holes in Mother’s suburban necro-utopia”, we must just accept that Self rarely allows consistency to clip the wings of his fancy.) More grotesquely, Lily is also haunted by the anthropomorphized fat she lost and gained during her life; “the Fats” are near-sightless, grumbling shapes, like myopic adolescents. She is led to this strange world by an aboriginal Australian, Phar Lapp, who has an odd preoccupation with her dentures, and a boomerang, with which he explains about karma; the novel, ending with a disastrous and grotesque reincarnation, is all about karma, though Lily doesn’t realize this until too late.
For all this intriguing surrealism, and despite some tricky chronological shifts to generate tension, there is little in the way of plot. The novel’s success or failure therefore rests heavily on the quality of Lily’s voice, moaning at us over 400 pages. But the relentless scorn, regardless of whether Lily is dying, dead or “deader” (the book’s three section headings), wears thin quickly. Lily Bloom writes like an older, female Will Self, and this is only flashingly justified to the sceptical reader. “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” was how Nabokov legitimized Humbert Humbert’s psychotic humour and criminal aestheticism. Lily announces forty pages in – and we are waiting for it – that she has “always been something of a phrase-maker”. In fact, self-satisfied “phrase-making” hobbles the prose. It repeats the same formula – take a proverb, cliché, catchphrase or famous quotation, and childishly pun on it; the original sentence alluded to is nothing but a vehicle for a cheap and repetitive joke.
Lily intersperses her bon mots with a torrent of four-letter words, indiscriminate prejudice and splenetic abuse. Shades of Self again, since everything about the world, especially the flesh, is hyperbolically dreadful: “A rambunctious river of pus and gleet and ichor; a cascade of mucus and bile and gall… a snotqueduct”; “the city is an encrustation upon a scab, cigarette ash flicked onto cigar ash”. When we come across “ganglia of cabling” we recall the “ganglia of electric wiring” in “Ward 9”; but Self’s tone has always been monotonous, even without repetitions and recyclings. Every noun must have its grim adjective; every phrase must have its exhaustive list of synonyms, preferably alliterating; every word must be mined for its aptness. So we get “sick of the nausea” (several times); “Clive’s baggage was exactly that – baggage”; “the semi on Crooked Usage was exactly that – half a house”, and so on. The “ironies” Lily delights in discovering are all too obviously contrived; one doctor is called Steel, for instance, just so we can have some scalpel jokes.
To an extent, the tone of disgust and self-disgust is deliberate; How the Dead Live, at one level, is a satirical (if cursory) portrait of a very bloody and alienating century, and the racism and bigotry that lace the book (which begins with a dismissive glance at the Soho pub bombing) is mediated unrelentingly. The word “Jew” is popped in wherever possible; “d’jew” is always employed instead of “d’you”, a shop called Lewmar becomes Jewmar, and the Jewish anti-Semitism is as relentless as the Gentile version. But the Jews are not really singled out; there seems to be no one in the joyless world of Lily Bloom who escapes a vicious generalization or dismissive outburst of hate.
The result is that the reader gets a diminishing sense of the horror of prejudice; evil is reduced to banality, and genocide is treated with the same boredom as suburban housekeeping. “I suppose I should’ve written a memoir before it was too late, but unlike Lady fucking Asquith I never kept a diary. The towns and cities and areas I’ve lived in, on two continents, over sixty-five years, merge into a composite Unpleasantville. The people I’ve known are resolved into types, appearing to me now as a set of plasticine figurines”, Lily writes; and, of her second husband, “Yaws became a physical archetype to me. All men in one – and all therefore hateful.” This is more of a problem than Self seems to realize; with a thin plot, flat characterization and no linguistic subtlety, How the Dead Live is a painfully dull book.