'Most novels are written by people who read too many novels for other people who read too many novels.'
Will Self
Will Self tells Katie McCalmont why he's not like other writers and explains why his new collection of short stories, Liver, is so very nasty.
'The things that derail us in life, the things that screw us up at a low level, are not the machinations of an evil spirit, not the Taliban nor Al Qaeda; it’s your in-growing toe nail or your fungal infection, it’s chance, it’s disease.'
Will Self looks pissed off when, after five good rings on the bell and a couple of resounding knocks, he finally opens the door. He looks me up and down with blue eyes set in that carved, mournful face. 'You're early', he says, and shows me to the sitting-room where I wait amidst the dark wood, rich colours and tribal art until he returns with two cups of strong tea. He sits down on the sofa next to me, crossing his legs and pulling one in towards his body, so that I am almost nose to toe with one of his enormous shoes.
Self's new book, Liver, is a collection of four very long short stories - "really more like novellas" - about the largest organ in the human body and its ruination in various unhappy ways. In true Selfian fashion the collection is subtitled with the elaborate: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes, and his instinct for sesquipedalian prose pervades each of the stories - an odd juxtaposition with his often base and physical subject matter. The stories pay visit to a cast of grotesque alcoholics set in a drinking club based on the real-life, recently condemned Colony Rooms, legendary haunt of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and the eighteen year old, probably delinquent Self; a seventy-year-old woman suffering from liver cancer who goes to Zurich for assisted suicide only to recover and find herself in a kind of physical, walking purgatory; a modern Prometheus set in London's ad land and tormented by a real griffon vulture; and a gaggle of desperate junkies waiting in a Kensington flat for their daily fix. They are bleak, hard work and very, very gritty.
They also serve to showcase Self's unique preoccupation with the body and its physical demands on his characters. In perhaps the strongest story of the collection, Leberknodel, he describes his heroine on the toilet: "Braced, Joyce voided herself. A smooth sensation: pleasing distension, holding on and then letting go. A rounded 'plop', a single cool splash on her left buttock." I don't think I would be alone in finding it somewhat bizarre and certainly uncomfortable to read, in detail, a description of a seventy year-old woman taking a shit, which is just the kind of attitude that irritates Self. "This sort of thing comes up again and again," he says in his acerbic, Alan Rickman drawl. "I don't think I'm alone in finding my conscious mind dominated by physical sensation. I find that if I've got a slight cold there is a radical change in my perception. So, I say this all the time, and people smile and think I'm a bit crazy, but I don't think my characters are over embodied, I think other writers' characters are disembodied." He defends his description of Joyce's bowel movements as far from gratuitous: the state of her shit is the best indicator of the state of her health and integral to the story.
I point out that other writers seem loath, or perhaps totally disinterested in engaging with this kind of banal description, and Self agrees. Having reread the books of W. G. Sebald recently, a writer he greatly admires, he found, "I came to dislike his tone, his lack of sensuality. Here you have a writer, a contemporary, writing four long books with only two mentions of sex, both of them voyeuristic and repelled. Now what's going on there?" In his opinion, this is a common result of the conventional expectations placed on fiction. First, that it must be optimistic - writers and readers want a journey towards mental well-being, or the possibility of mental well-being, and that's why the bodily is largely excluded - "the message of the body is you're dying. The message of the body is disquiet and discomfort, and it's not a message that's inducive to a feeling of enormous well-being." Secondly, the novelist is a romantic whose characters must be motivated by grand emotional drama. Self, on the other hand, likes to argue that he depicts the uncomfortable truth that humans are shaped by a physical reality: "the things that derail us in life, the things that screw us up at a low level, are not the machinations of an evil spirit, not the Taliban nor Al Qaeda; it's your in-growing toe nail or your fungal infection, the drunk driving the car at the intersection. It's randomnicity, it's chance, it's disease." Finally, he suggests that 'other writers' find themselves restricted by a conventionality he has consciously disengaged from: "Most novels are written by people who read too many novels for other people who read too many novels. There's a stereotypy there, since most of those novels don't include the body in that way, theirs don't."
Liver is Self's third book in a year, following Pyschogeography, a collection of the best of the last five years of columns written for the Independent, and The Butt, a satirical shaggy dog story about a tourist in a part-Australian, part-African, part-Middle Eastern imaginary continent. Self has always been a prolific writer, the variety and breadth of his far extending that of most novelists. He points out that these books were all shorter than his last novel, The Book of Dave, and in any case, they came to him fairly easily: "The Butt was a short story and then just carried on going, and Liver more or less wrote itself". This approach to writing differs to many authors who suffer from what he calls 'The Delusion of Posterity': "that's when people get hung up on working on the same book for years and years and years. They have some platonic idea of what the perfect form is. I've never really suffered from that. It's been good working as journalist for that, I'm used to working to deadlines, I'm used to things having a kind of use-value to them, rather than having some kind of existential value outside of that." Self's output in the last year mirrors the efficiency and immediacy of a journalist more than any writer I know. It is his double life in Fleet Street that has also helped him develop his uniquely public image which has served him well over the years: "I to some extent quite consciously manufacture this public image, which is a sales person for my book ... and I persist with it. If I don't do it, I can guarantee I won't get the sales to be able to afford to carry on writing and to live in the manner that unfortunately I have become accustomed."
Self is keen to strengthen and perpetuate his individuality by consciously rejecting a conventional approach to his craft. He chose Politics over English at Oxford in order to escape the 'oppressive' weight of the English canon and he is scathing of typical character-based stories, what he terms as 'naturalistic' fiction, arguing that these are just the rehashing of old archetypes: "It might be Madame Bovary retold and set in South London in 2008 for example: a nice story but never anything more unique or individual than that." He avoids reading fiction, unless it's for a project. At the moment he is working on 'something about LA' and is reading the likes of Joan Didion and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He can be a "pretty savage critic" unleashing a tirade against those books that disappoint him: "even Wodehouse wrote an LA novel, called Laughing Gas. God he's a bad writer - what is the cult of Wodehouse? Oh God, he sucks."
As Self is quick to confirm, his own fiction can be pretty difficult: he doesn't care much about his characters, he has a very negative view of what really motivates human reality and in his search for the 'truth' he revels in the grotesque and the shockingly physical. None of these things make for an easy read, but that is the point. He asks me what I think of the stories and when I reply that I found them "nasty and pretty sinister". He flashes a wolfish grin and says, "Good!"
Thursday, 2 October, 2008
In Interviews
- Dave Eggers
- Richard Flanagan
- John Banville
- Helen Oyeyemi
- Amit Chaudhuri
- Rana Dasgupta
- Edmund White
- Tobias Hill
- Christmas Books
- Russell Hoban
- Will Self
- Aleksandar Hemon
- Kate Summerscale
- Philip Gourevitch
- Simon Gray
- Aravind Adiga
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