Will Self's emphasis on writing for his characters is what confuses critics... Will Self’s Man Booker nominated novel Umbrella was variously compared to the works of Joyce, Kafka, Eliot, Woolf and other luminaries of modernism on publication last year, as literary journalists tried desperately to both classify and understand it. Indeed, Sarfraz Manzoor's opening question to Self was to ask what exactly the novel is about. Self gave what one imagines is by now an enormously well rehearsed description of Umbrella's narrative and themes saying it's about how "an individual's pathology can in some sense express an entire period of cultural, social and  powerful technological change. See, simple really." It only took another prod on the subject of his use of a modernistic style to launch Self into an attack on the critic's need to place Umbrella alongside a body of other modernist works: "Literary critics love what they call inter-textuality. They love to talk about books only in terms of other books. They do it because it's what's called "professional closure" - they do it because only literary critics can do it. They don't want to do anything as prosaic as discuss a book in relation to the world - because any old fool could do that" The need both for him and his work to have a relationship with the world appears to be a very strong motivation. In choosing how to write Umbrella, he had a number of options open to him and his decisions all point toward a need to ground his writing in the real world. For example, he chooses to use the continuous present tense, rather than the more conventional simple past - since we live in a world where things are happening right now and go on happening. Most important perhaps is his emphasis on character and perspective which always places experience above any higher authorial voice. "Collectively, we all have our First World War" he stated, so it makes sense that the version of the event he presents in his novel is distinctly that of his character Stanley rather than one reported by Self, or anyone else. When researching the novel, he says, he looked at photographs more than books for inspiration. This was not just to gain a visual perspective for his characters, but one not influenced by conventional sources - books which are more often than not written by the middle-classes. "My characters are working class characters," he explained, "and yet it seems to me that writers always tend to look to literary sources when they're doing period (fiction)." The most noticeable result of this being a lack of authentic dialogue in period fiction - as he points out, nobody swears in Downton Abbey. And so, he focusses on seeing the world from his character's perspective, rather than building a world around them on their behalf. It's not surprising given this approach that Self is not only one of the country's most prominent novelists, but also a journalist whose views command a great deal of weight. "They've got me listed in the programme here as journalist and author - as though they're two distinct things." "My first book, The Quantity Theory of Insanity was enormously successful, and I could at that point have said 'That's it, I'm a Writer!' and retired to my room." But, he didn't - in fact Self came to journalism through his fiction, rather than the other way around - rather than close himself off to develop his art, he pushed out into the wider world. It is this experience which in large part has ended up informing the "evolving trilogy" of which Umbrella is the first part. His journalistic eye lingers on a world where "we have outsourced violence" to other parts of the world less inconvenient for ourselves. This is his direct response to the theory, proposed by Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels Of Our Nature, that violence worldwide is declining. "I think you can't ever eradicate violence - there's a quantity theory of violence - you cannot eradicate it from human nature." Parts two and three of the trilogy will apparently "progress through the 20th century's wars" right up to and including Iraq. They'll continue to be grounded in the real world lives of their characters, and critics will continue to try to find a book to compare them to, although at least when the second one comes out they'll have Umbrella to mention alongside the others... Dan Lewis, for Waterstones.com/blog You can buy Umbrella at your local Waterstones bookshop (http://bit.ly/s6sdlu) or online at Waterstones.com (http://bit.ly/18fI1vb)