Some thoughts on Will Self’s How The Dead Live. The first 280 or so pages deliver the constant narrative pleasure of some illicit drug. One is constantly buoyed along by the wonderful storytelling.American Lily Bloom, twice-married, now a widow living in London, is dying of cancer--and then stone dead of it. We are there at her long deathbed scene after which she finds herself non-living in a London of the astral plane in her subtle body. We share her last days and the decade or so of her afterlife. She begins to smoke again since it can't possibly harm her. Lily non-lives in a London where only the dead know the little out of the way places, in this case Dulston, somewhere near Dalston, a complete neighborhood of the dead. This arbitrarily imagined world makes a kind of crazy sense, so vividly is it rendered, so consistent is its patterning and rules of order. The dead meet in groups at the community center to learn how to become dead. It's a 12-step program. The afterlife it turns out is as problematic and bureaucratic as life itself. It's also intolerably banal. Lily is led in her death odyssey by dead Australian aborigine, Phar Lap Jones. She is able to visit the living, non-living as she does in the midst of them. She visits Natalia her junkie daughter--a very sad story Self mistakenly thinks he can make funny--and her materialist daughter Charlene who with her husband owns a chain of stores called Waste of Paper. Once dead Lily is free to witness the comings and goings of these two daughters. Natalia, or Natty, is one of the saddest portraits of a junky I have ever read, William Burroughs’s tales not excepted. Natty has turned herself into a walking talking blight on humanity. She is a raving lunatic beauty, a complete waste of human flesh. She is a whore living with her pimp for junk. Self reminds me here of a young Martin Amis. Sometimes, too, one senses the madcap sensibility of Samuel Beckett. The tone is strident, reminiscent also at times of certain Thomas Bernhard novels. Though these are just hints for those who haven't read the man. Will Self transcends his models. He makes it new, as Ezra Pound once said. However, if you're looking for a modulation of tone this is not the novel for you. It's a no-holds-barred all out rant against the unfairness of life and death. Lily is never enlightened by her own passing. She is deep in what the Buddhists term samsara: the endless cycle of birth and suffering and death and rebirth. Enlightenment? She's too pissed off for that. She must alas be reborn continually until she sees the light, which in her case may be several hundreds lives off. About page 280 or so I must admit I began to feel rather brutalized. Self's word play is as relentless as the tone, though it never rises to the subtle sometimes italicized level of his model, Martin Amis.Mostly, I admire the novel. There can be no question of the author's mastery of narrative. In the first 280 pages there are long brainy sections that simply sing and these can be terribly funny as well. The storytelling in this part is gripping and vivid. However, a novel of ideas this is not. How The Dead Live, like Money, is a voice novel in which tone becomes everything and overrides form. I was perplexed by the italicized "Christmas 2001" sections. These sections really become tedious until one discovers, at the very end, what they mean. Self does not sufficiently adumbrate. I was absolutely lost reading them. Note: being somewhat lost or rather lost is part of the fun of fiction. But I was entirely lost in these sections, which made them seem to me like pointless padding. Poor editing me thinks.In closing, let me say again that there are long patches of beautiful writing here and many funny bits. But the book is at least 75 pages too long. A judicious editing the novel certainly deserved and did not appear to get. I recommend it nevertheless. Read it, stay with it if you can, but be prepared to bleed.
How do the dead live? Well, they don't go to heaven where the angels fly, and they don't go to the lake of fire and fry on the 4th of July. What they do do is move to a different suburb or a different part of the city, living and working alongside the living for the rest of eternity. This horrifyingly mundane vision of the afterlife plays as the central conceit of Will Self's superlative-sputtering third novel, allowing its narrator, Lily Bloom, to die agonizingly from cancer and then stick around for a decade of stewing in her own rage and disappointment. And Lilly has a lot that disappoints her: her two letdown daughters, two failed marriages, a cold American upbringing, her own slow and inescapable weight gain, her feelings of being shafted out of the sexual revolution of the 60's, the vapidity of English society, her own Jewish heritage, her failures as a pocket pen designer, hell, the whole fucking WORLD disappoints Lily! So the afterlife is equally disappointing, even with its byzantine bureaucratic structure, and her aborigine spirit guide, Phar Lap Jones; and the ghost of her foul-mouthed 9 year-old son; and the pop standard singing spirit of the fossilized fetus she never knew was pocketed away in her womb; and the gibbering ghosts of all the fat she has ever lost but gained back; and even the occasional tired tries at discorporated banging with a fellow lingering dead. So when Lily is not railing and spitting acid abouthow much life and now death sucks, she stalks her two daughters, one, a pudgy snob who has married an equally snobby but ultra-successful owner of a chain of office supply stores; the other, the wonderfully selfish and anemic femme fatale, Natasha. Natasha serves as an inverted analog of (recently (when written) and permanently clean) Will Self's own years of drug abuse; and for those who think Will Self is just a druggie writer, well, portraying yourself as a scabby, thieving junkie isn't exactly a flattering self-estimation). The two sisters' lifestyles serve as an open season for Self to satirize the increasingly consumerism-obsessed culture of 1990's London, as well serves as the fulcrum for a harrowing and ominous series of deaths, births, and rebirths.How the Dead Live is a tour de force not only in sustained voice (Lily's profane, pessimistic view of the world is both hilarious and relentless, but not necessarily always correct in its observations), but also in satiric invention and existential brooding. Heartbreaking, hilarious and horrifying, How the Dead Live is my favorite Self I've read so far. You're fucking up by not reading Will Self. Quit fucking up. Read How the Dead Live.
What do You think about How The Dead Live (2000)?
Well... I'm not quite sure what to say about this book. I bought it several years ago but didn't get around to reading it before now. It's my first Will Self book. I must say that during some parts of the book, I didn't feel like I quite got it.The story is about the life, death and especially after-life of one Lily Bloom, a not to nice elderly woman who after having succumbed to cancer, experiences afterlife - which takes place in a London suburb. Death seems like being very like life - except for not being able to taste or feel or other tangible experience. This however allows for unlimited smoking without having to be afraid of the effects so all dead people smokes - a lot!Other surreal aspects is that when you die, you still have to deal with bureaucracy, aptly named the deatheaucracy, still have to work and clean your home - and you get to live with any small child you have lost or even those who were aborted etc. And worst of all, if you lost and gained a lot of weight during your life, you have to live with this fat as well, behaving like a annoying teenager basically.The book is weird and atypical and funny - and I liked it, but didn't love it.
—Christina
5. How the Dead Live by Will Self 3/5 stars (02.01) 404 pgsI'm not quite sure how I feel about this book. I didn't have to force myself to finish it, but I was eager to be done because I didn't like spending time with Lilly Bloom, alive or dead. The story is told by Lilly Bloom who is dying, then dead from breast cancer. Will Self said that the story is based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead and as a Buddhist I find the story believable. Lilly dies of cancer and after death is ushered into her life as a dead person by Phar Lap Jones, an Aborigine from Australia who wears cowboy boots, jeans, mirror sun glasses and a big white Stetson. She is accompanied in death by Lithy, the lithopedion, a calcified foetus that fell out of her uterus upon her death and now sings pop songs from the 70s, 80, and 90s, Rude Boy, her son who was hit by a car and age 9 and now runs around swearing at people and waving his penis, and the Fats, the eyeless, blobs of fat that consist of all the weight she gained and lost in her life who chant, "old and fat, old and fat" at Lilly.The laws of Karma are in action here. Lilly's attachments to her daughters, her guilt over her son's death, her obsession with sex, and her anger at her husbands keep her stuck in a London she does not like. Phar Lap tries a few times to let Lilly know that she could be free off this cycle if she wanted to be, but Lilly is too attached. The addictions and negative emotions that distracted her in life (her Karmic seeds) follow her in death and ultimately bloom because she will not let go of them.Will Self is a gifted wordsmith. His stream of consciousness style is engaging, intelligent, witty, and flows very smoothly. He created a London of the dead that felt like an alternate London, complete with knowable, quite original characters. The story rambled this way and that at times as Lilly looks back at her 60 some years revealing to the reader the roots of her attachments, and narrates the lives of her daughters to us. No one was likeable and Karma does not guarantee a happy ending. The Karmic seeds Lilly planted and nurtured are the seeds that blossomed. I think the book is worth reading, but I'm glad I'm done with it.
—Wendy
This is the latest in a long line of Will Self novel's I've read 'My Idea of Fun', 'Book of Dave' and also the short story collections 'Liver' and 'Walking to Hollywood'.For what it's worth, I think it's one of my favourite yet. Despite the bleakness of the tone, I think it works brilliantly as a black comedy, with some real insight into the human condition with regards to the subject of death.As ever, Self's writing can be dense and somewhat cryptic, but this novel is soon an addictive pursuit and I read it very quickly despite the often abstract subject matter.A continuing theme with Self's writing, the psychological and cultural topography of London is used here to hinge the physical breakdown of the anti-heroine narrator Lily Bloom. Some of her exhortations against subjects as diverse as Jewish stereotypes and combat trousers are frankly hilarious.For me, Will Self is one of the greatest contemporary British writers and always displays an imagination far beyond the realms of many of his contemporaries. A great book if you can cope with some of the bleaker parts.I immediately went to Amazon and ordered his latest novel 'Umbrella' which I look forward to reading in the next few months...
—Paul Gelsthorpe
