Families in literature: Lily Bloom in How the Dead Live by Will Self
Critics slammed Self’s blackly comic extravaganza about an angry matriarch stuck in the afterlife - but it’s one of the most piercing portraits of maternal love I have ever read
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.
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