Self Vs Littlejohn
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NICKY CAMPBELL:
Your book is called How the Dead Live, Will, and basically it's a horror story - somebody dies and then stops being dead. Well you tell us. You wrote it anyway.
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WILL SELF:
I did write it and you manifestly haven't read it.
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CAMPBELL:
Well, you know, there's a lot to do on this programme.
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SELF:
I know, I appreciate that. It is not a snide dig. It is quite a difficult book, it takes about 13 or 14 hours to read. So it is a fair claim on people's attention spans. It is really about what happens to a pretty standard, kind of materialistic, atheistic person who, when they die discovers that really what the Tibetan Buddhists have to say about cosmology and about the afterlife turns out to be true. So to say that it is a kind of portrait of what everybody's death is like is not quite right. It is a portrait of one particular person's death and their experience about it. I suppose it has horrific elements and it is after all told from the point of view of somebody who is dead. So that that gives them a slightly kind of "Sunset Boulevard" feel, but it is not strictly speaking a horror story.
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CAMPBELL:
That's not to say I won't read it, you've made me feel quite guilty now.
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SELF:
No - that was just a low crack.
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CAMPBELL:
It's just that you have a lot to do in three hours and you get books at 6 o'clock on a Tuesday night - you have got to bath the kids - you know all about that.
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SELF:
I do. I have many children. Many, many children.
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CAMPBELL:
Neither did I get a chance to read yours Richard but that's not to say that I won't. But what do you make of what David Aaronovitch has said? It is front page in the Independent. He says Richard Littlejohn's novel is a 400-page recruiting pamphlet for the BNP.
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LITTLEJOHN:
What else do you expect from an overgrown student union leader who used to be a member of the Communist Party? I think it is a badge of honour to be attacked by people like David Aaronovitch to be perfectly honest. I might put it on the cover.
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SELF:
Well he is right.
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LITTLEJOHN:
Is he?
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SELF:
It is a 400 page... I've read 200 pages of it and that is a 200 page recruiting leaflet for the BNP.
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LITTLEJOHN:
Well, you can't comment until you have read the other 200.
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SELF:
Why? Does it suddenly turn into Tolstoy?
