Self Analysis 7 - How The Dead Live Review

It’s funny how novels change in the memory. Thinking back to when I first read How The Dead Live, my memories are all of the protagonist Lily Bloom’s afterlife in Dulston, and her relationships with the bizarre supporting cast of characters including Phar Lap Jones, an aboriginal spirit guide, Lithy, a fossilised foetus, and the angry spirit of her deceased son Rude Boy.  As I mentioned in my piece on Great Apes, the grotesque elements of Self’s novels tend to telescope in the mind, relegating the more realistic sections to a mental footnote. I was surprised, then, on re-reading the novel how much of the text was concerned with Lily’s time in the London of the living.

The technique Self employs in the opening third of the novel is similar to the one he returns to in his most recent publication, Umbrella; in both novels, Self chooses a bed-bound old woman as a subject, thinking back impressionistically over the events of their lives. In common with Audrey Death, the subject of Umbrella, Lily’s career includes war work, and a healthy dose of sexual liberation. If Umbrella is the high-point to date of Self’s modernism, How The Dead Live represents a first foray into the form, asking the question ‘if we are documenting the minute realities of daily life, then where are all the old women?’ Obviously, being Self, they aren’t simply overlooked; they are ‘an entire demographic grouping of Trotskys’.

The concept behind How The Dead Live is simple, but memorable. After death, our ‘subtle bodies’ begin a new life in the London suburb of Dulston. The dead exist alongside the living, largely ignored by them; as in life, taxes and bureaucracy are perpetual irritants. This idea of death as a sort of cosmic downsizing was first explored in The North London Book of the Dead, from Self’s debut collection. Here, the idea is ornamented by a surreal twist. The inhabitants of Dulston are plagued by reminders of their past; aborted foetuses, dead children and lumps of shed body fat are manifested in corporeal form. Lily’s children, the practical, severe Charlotte and the childlike, impulsive Natasha, are replaced by Rude Boy, the spirit of her dead son David, ‘permanently arrested in the brattish mood of defiance’, and the freewheeling Lithy, ‘a miniscule cadaver of a child… a little dead fossil baby’ who communicates through the medium of seventies pop song lyrics.

Contrary to popular belief (and despite what the previous quote would suggest), Self can switch off the sesquipedalianism, and Lily’s narrative voice is very much her own. The grandiloquence comes in later, to heighten the gothic nature of the afterlife. How The Dead Live is also less satirical than the typical Self novel, although there is an edge to the way that Dulston's community echoes that of living London (‘last ten years gone death’s bin kinda deregulated. Yeh-hey?’, as Phar Lap Jones idiosyncratically puts it).

Instead, Self seems to be using the novel to explore sobriety. The inhabitants of Dulston spend their time watching the living, and mirroring their actions, but their subtle forms cannot experience sensations. If we view the text as autobiographical, then we see Self narrating the process of getting clean, going through the same routines, but with the edges taken off, the senses no longer heightened. Still inhabiting a decadent demi monde, Self sees images of intoxication everywhere, but is no longer a participant. Instead, he stares in at the window, feeling invisible.

A similar experience was described by the Restoration poet and rake John Wilmot, in The Disabled Debauchee. Written during a period of enforced abstinence (Wilmot was ravaged by the effects of alcoholism and sexually transmitted diseases), the poet imagines himself as a retired admiral, who crawls to the top of a mountain to watch battle rage in the valleys below, conducted by younger men: ‘My pain at least some respite shall afford / While I behold the battles you maintain / When fleets of glasses sail about the board / From whose broadsides volleys of wit shall rain’. One strand of Christian thought predicts that the main source of entertainment for souls in heaven would be to watch what was happening on earth; Wilmot likewise takes vicarious pleasure in watching his successors: ‘each bold action to his mind renews / his present glory and his past delight’.

In the same manner, Lily obsessively watches her living children, taking particular interest in the heroin addict, Natasha. Self takes a different tone to the transcendent view of heroin expressed by, say, Renton in Trainspotting. For Self, the drug’s purpose is ‘to supply deviants with the delusion of normalcy… they may set out for an artificial paradise, but the real estate they all end up inhabiting is one and the same’. To help her adapt to her new situation, Lily is encouraged to take part in group counselling sessions, where the attendees chant the ‘twelve steps of the personally dead’, allowing Self to satirise the blandishments of treatment programmes: ‘Gog grant me the stupidity to deny there’s anything I cannot change, the temerity to neglect the things I can, and the ignorance to be incapable of distinguishing between the two’.

Whilst Lily is undergoing her spiritual cold turkey, she watches Natasha take a different path to sobriety. The ‘death guides’ employed to orient new arrivals into the afterlife are an assortment of shamen, voodoo priests and other representatives of what are ‘largely called traditional peoples, yeh-hey?’ As Phar Lap Jones notes, ‘you Westerners can’t get no grasp on the death stuff’. Natasha undergoes her own withdrawal from society, travelling across Australia and eventually into the outback, accompanied by a post-graduate anthropology student. Conrad was a big influence on Self, and this idea of travelling away from society in a Heart of Darkness trip is one that Self returns to in The Butt. Unfortunately, it isn’t a theme which he has really successfully got to grips with. The Butt is almost certainly Self’s least satisfying novel, and here Natasha’s odyssey is rather a weak link in what is otherwise an excellent piece of writing.

How The Dead Live is classic Self, filled with stylistic and thematic links to other works in his oeuvre. I’ve already mentioned Umbrella, The North London Book of the Dead and The Butt; he also revives the line from My Idea of Fun about ‘a mobile telephone which looks like a black plastic tibia’ which so annoyed Private Eye’s reviewer, and drops in some of the aphoristic descriptions of upper class Englishmen which would be such a feature of Dorian (‘when he strolled back to the Elysian pavilion, his entry in the score-card read ‘retired bored’). Some of Dulston’s residents suffer perpetual posthumous punishments at the hands of The Furies of The Lord of Death, an idea which was returned to in Prometheus, the third story in Liver: ‘without so much as a by-your-leave he chops off my head, removes my heart, extracts my intestines’. Maybe the only think the novel lacks is a visit from Dr Busner.

In terms of reception, How The Dead Live was something of a disappointment; it achieved neither the critical praise that would be afforded to Dorian, nor the level of sales achieved by The Book of Dave. In particular, it was skewered by the New York Times reviewer, who concluded ‘throw this book at the wall and it would stick’. For me, though, the novel is an integral part of Self’s best creative period (to date); punning wordplay is scattered through the prose like a compulsive tic, but this doesn’t detract from Self’s ability to depict a world at once vivid and grotesque. Without giving the appearance of confession, How The Dead Lives could be Self’s most personal novel, giving the text a sense of richness and depth. Next up would be Dorian, his re-imagining of Oscar Wilde’s gothic classic.

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