I am not interested, David, in sales,” says Will Self. “I’m interested in readers.”
Numerous times during our interview, he will drop in my name in this way, the way a consummate salesman might. I say “interview” but, in honesty, that is to misrepresent the course of the meeting. And if there is one thing Self wishes to insist upon at this moment – this dangerous moment in our world, and this dangerous moment in his life – it is honesty. Self is a very ill man, undergoing treatment for the blood cancer secondary myelofibrosis, and the looming possibility of his own demise has concentrated his mind.
Our lopsided dialogue is more an epic disquisition on his part, as well as an inquisition by him of me. Much like his latest novel, The Quantity Theory of Morality, his conversation operates as a series of fractals, each idea spiralling off into a multitude of variations, underpinned by fierce intelligence and a formidable breadth of reading. His long and now immuno-compromised frame initially folds itself more or less upright into an armchair in his front room. More than two hours later, he is crumpled over it, listing sideways close to horizontal, his body capitulating as his mind defiantly fizzes and pours out words, and his justly concerned wife, the French Armenian writer Nelly Kaprièlian, checks on him under the pretext of replenishing tea and biscuits.
Written with his usual hyperventilating mordancy, The Quantum Theory of Morality intentionally comes full circle on his first book, the 1993 short story collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity. Yet it enters a very different world of letters; one in which, he says, “the literary novel is no longer at the cultural centre. So if I wanted to get any attention, I had to do a Lazarus and pick up my bed and start giving interviews.” It starts off as though anticipating the product of a Language Learning Model tasked with repeatedly rewriting the same Hampstead novel about a collection of middle-class friends, some Jewish, and unfolds into a dystopian picture of a Britain abruptly collapsed into antisemitic totalitarianism that is at once bitterly funny and horribly credible. The atmosphere and detail are just right. The only false note is struck by this urgent Jew obsession emanating not from the left, but from the populist/neo-fascist right, which one might argue is presently more preoccupied with what one of the book’s characters calls the “blacks and browns”.
Among its objectives, The Quantum Theory of Morality reckons profoundly with the modern crisis in ethics (he identifies one symptom as the reason “we’re no longer capable of producing satire”) and in literacy (“the crisis in ethics is also the crisis in literature,” he says, describing the effects of AI as “devastating”). Yet Self is keen most of all “to use [the book] as a focus for a renewed discourse within and between the Jewish community and the wider world. OK, so my ambitions are small.” He falls into a simultaneous fit of coughing and uproarious laughter. “Not much of a task.”
His relationship with his own Jewishness (half-Jewishness, he would say), and with Jewry as a whole, is both fractured and fractious. He is the son of an American woman he describes as a “Jewish antisemite”, whose life was the basis of his previous book, Elaine (2024), and a “Christian Englishman”. “My mother disguised her Jewish identity and tried to pass most of her life.” This did not preclude her accusing his father of unwitting complicity in the Holocaust during domestic arguments. “You know, I’ve got a lot to come to terms with.
“My public position has been quite well known. I resigned as a Jew in 2009” – this opinion piece in the Evening Standard, in fact, appeared in 2006 – “when the IDF went into the Lebanon.” So far, so Asajew – that is, a person who invokes their Jewish identity only when deploying it to assail Israel or performatively distinguish themselves from all those other, morally suspect Jews.
But Self has moved on. By 2018, in a BBC broadcast of A Point Of View, he was expressing regret, catching himself in what he called “Livingstonian opinions”. He found his own sense of Jewishness reinforced by the rise in antisemitism. He still maintained the view, commonplace among those who would wriggle out from under any charge of anti-Jewish racism by repudiating Jewish ethnicity, that “the genetic and hence racial component of Jewishness is really pretty slight”. He now acknowledges with rueful black humour the irony of his falling prey to one of the “hideous diseases” to which his genetic inheritance make Jews disproportionately prone.
Another decade on, Self sees all around him the antisemitism over which many Jews of a comparable background and disposition to his own – secular, left-leaning, assimilationist more by default than intent – were sounding the alarm as it surged with their own social, cultural and political circles. “A large part of the inspiration for the book [came] after I’d heard about the 300,000 kids shouting, ‘Death to the IDF’ ... if you cry death to a group that is solely constituted by people from a minor ethnicity, you are calling death [upon that ethnicity]. That is the point about what happened to Glastonbury [last summer] and that’s why I wrote the book. The review of Elaine in the Jewish Chronicle … did say [one thing] that hit home very strongly: why won’t Self come to terms with his Jewish identity? He plays with it, essentially toys with it. I thought, actually, yeah, they’ve got a point.”
Self sees “the microaggressions all the time now”. “You may be angry with the Greens because” – alluding to an earlier remark of mine – “you think they’re sucking up the antisemitic, crap Corbynite left, and I think that’s a perfectly reasonable criticism. I’m with you on that.”
You may be angry with the Greens because you think they’re sucking up the antisemtic, crap Corbynite left, and I’m with you on that
The Will Self of 2026 is a different proposition to that of 2006, and to the dim, doctrinaire denialists of the confluence between leftist and Islamist antisemitism: the people who think the antisemitism isn’t antisemitism, the antisemites aren’t antisemites, and the antisemites are right. Self knows the antisemitism is antisemitism. He agrees the antisemites are antisemites. And on today’s flashpoint in antisemitism, he still thinks the antisemites are right.
That, of course, being the existence of Israel. Self is, by his own description, an “anti-Zionist” [sic], yet he has disavowed much of the rhetoric that customarily accompanies that view. In a recent article for Harper’s Magazine he describes The Quantity Theory of Morality as a “mea culpa”, having detected “even among my own adult children … that faint taint of antisemitism”. He cites his former collaborator, the cartoonist Martin Rowson, as just one example of the willingness among highly educated self-professed antiracists to disseminate antisemitic tropes, whether through conscious animus or “at best … arrant stupidity”. (Rowson apologised for a 2023 cartoon of then BBC chairman Richard Sharp which deployed such tropes.) In short, Self objects to almost everything about the typical antizionist except their antizionism.
We should note that this is not necessarily a false position. Consider how often those of us who would accept, faut de mieux, the (increasingly niche, alas) categorisation of progressive Zionists find ourselves in accord with people we otherwise oppose over specific questions about Israel. What’s sauce for the goose...
Self, who cites Noahide law and the Talmud for his “universal ethical framework”, believes it is an ethical failure for Jews to support the existence of Israel “as it is currently constituted”. He cleaves to his position as a one-state solutionist because he thinks it is right even if awful people also think it is right. The riposte is that this a pipe-dream in a Jew-fixated world where, had a one-state solution ever been viable, no state at all might have been necessary. But you could also argue that his is a serious, good-faith position usually held by altogether unserious people of very bad faith indeed. And when he says that “Jews have to criticise Israel openly and directly”, it has a certain moral force coming from a man who is ready to criticise, severely, those on his own side of the argument.
Nor does he wish to proclaim his own virtues at our expense. In a subsequent email to me, he writes, “I’m interested in discourse so I don’t want to alienate anyone … it’s of vital importance that we keep talking even though the shooting has started!” I will argue with Self about a lot of things, but I won’t argue with him about that.
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