Christmas 2001 is special for Lily Bloom, because it’s then that she is reunited with her youngest child. Since this is a Will Self novel, “Lithy” is no ordinary baby but a lithopedion - a fossilised embryo retained within the mother whose existence was only discovered after Lily’s death.
Of indeterminate sex, Lithy is incurably cheerful, belting out sixties pop songs as she capers around the afterlife on her calcified stumps and tussles with Rude Boy, Lily’s only son, who is stuck as a delinquent pre-teen after being mown down by a lorry at the age of nine. If this doesn’t seem the happiest family scenario, bear with me: it gets worse.
Lily spends the first half of the novel dying horribly of cancer, and the second half acclimatising to a ghost world that is a palimpsest of the one she used to inhabit. While the living go about their lives in the East London district of Dalston, the dead throng a shadow zone called Dulston, billeted in squalid flats and forced by a merciless bureaucracy to attend interminable rehab meetings while working at menial jobs to pay off their lifetime’s debts.
The respectable dead can seek a transfer to the Dulburbs, but this was never going to be an option for Lily, who is East London Jewish to the bitter core, and too obsessed with her two living daughters to think of putting herself beyond spying distance. Charlotte disgusts her by rising in the world; Natasha inspires a voyeuristic horror by succumbing to the life of a junkie.
When How the Dead Live was published in 2001, it was widely lambasted for its literary grandstanding and what one critic described as its “tone of unvarying contempt”. It is certainly audacious to frame a novel as a soliloquy by a woman called Bloom. But the invocation of Ulysses is more than just a showy allusion and Lily is much more than the sum of her contempt.
She is the antithesis of James Joyce’s Molly Bloom, a hater rather than a lover, whose final word is not “yes” but “not”. However, unlike Molly, Lily is also primarily a mother rather than a wife, who carries her own baggage - and it is this that makes her so riotously compelling. In this Boschian necropolis, a lifetime of bad habits come back literally to haunt her - not least the three heckling doppelgangers, The Fats, who slither about her bedroom, taunting her with the weight she has lost and regained in a lifetime of yo-yo dieting.
As one of the world’s great ranters, Lily can be tiresome, but if the literature of the last century - from Thomas Bernhard to Howard Jacobson - has taught us anything, it’s that you have to read between the rants. As Lily says: “It’s good to keep the contemptuous, dismissive, cynical pose - it keeps the fear at bay.”
Gradually it becomes clear that Lily is an attentive mother, who has cared for her children even as she insulated herself with extra-marital sex and antidepressants against the frustrations of married life. What messed her up was the death of her son, which she is condemned by her unresolved guilt to re-enact in brutal anatomical detail. As she puts it: “Shock is a badly constructed narrative.”
As Lily also says, children are closest to their mothers when they are small. On the page she despises her one successful child, but the subtext is that prosperous, happily married Charlotte has grown beyond her, while Natasha, the incontinent smackhead, will forever be trapped with her in the intimacy of baby-talk.
So, far from being a display of unvarying contempt, this is one of the saddest, most piercing portraits of maternal love I have read, which spreads the painful ambivalences of family life out for all to see. “Even in Pride and Prejudice the Bennet sisters were fucking people over, and screwing them up, and shitting on them - when off the page,” says Lily. It’s just that the Blooms are fated to do it on the page.
