This - How The Dead Live - is not only a typically eccentric Will Self title, it's also a remarkably succinct description of his new novel's contents. It is the story of Lily Bloom, who is rather astonished, and none too pleased, to die and find that her firmly-held belief in the absence of a life-hereafter is incorrect. Quite to the contrary, the dead live on - in Lily's case, in a grimy enclave of London streets called Dulston. Lily's lessons in how the dead live include regular meetings of the Personally Dead ("Hello, I'm Lily and personally, I think I'm dead") and learning to live with her own fleet of attendant dead, which includes a singing fossilised foetus called Lithy and an obese triad of Fats made up of a lifetime of flesh lost and gained through dieting.
This, then, is typical Self territory; a kind of realist surrealism where Death is a rather laid-back Australian aboriginal called Phar Lap Dixon, who owns a chain of restaurants as a sideline. Typical, too, is the Self-ish tone of How The Dead Live - satiric, tricksy, virtuoso and scathing. Lily is permanently angry - not about the things you'd expect, like the fact that her darling daughter Nathalie is a heroin addict, but about the way her life has been spent in search of underwear that fits properly.
The problem with this unrelenting diet of bile and acid is that it becomes indigestible after a while. The humorous conceit of death as a slightly dull suburb wanes quickly, and we are left with a cast of mean-minded, self-obsessed, vitriolic characters who are never given the freedom to be anything other than mouthpieces for Self himself. Shame, really, that most of them are unhappily dead already - that's that plight out of the question, then.
Louise East is an Irish Times journalist.