Will Self

He would go for kippers on the Brighton Belle when he took the train down to visit his grandfather, Albert Henry Self.

“He commuted every day to London on the Brighton Belle eating his kippers and doing his studying, and I remember the Brighton Belle very well, when I was a kid in the 1960s and doing the same.

“I would be about seven or eight and come down for weekends.

He resided at 16 Vernon Terrace and Self used to go to that house when he was a child.

“We had the top half as a weekend flat and we’d stay there a lot. I knew Brighton fairly well in the 1960s and 1970s.”

And what was Brighton like for the young Self?

“Dead is the word that sums it up. Certainly moribund. You never could have reckoned on it being the exciting, teeming, cosmopolitan party hub it’s become. Tumbleweeds were blowing down Western Road. The most exciting establishment was Hanningtons.”

The department store was just east of what is now Churchill Square .

“I remember the first branch of Habitat we’d ever seen opening. It must have been about 1972. That was incredibly exciting. That was the shape of the future: a white, globular, wire and paper lampshade.”

Though Self is a Booker Prize-nominated author, he was not the sort of boy who kept diaries.

“I played around with writing stories and stuff like that but I’ve never been a diarist of any note at all.”

But the early Brighton memories stayed with him and found their way into his debut novel, 1993’s My Idea Of Fun, which is based on memory rather than contemporary notes, and follows sad, lonely Ian Wharton, whose life is dominated by his over-sexual mother.

Grandfather Albert, a polymath and savant, has made it into Self’s ninth novel and his first nomination for the Booker Prize, Umbrella.

He says the nomination is “slightly deranging”, in that the author is placed between being regarded as having produced something significant and lasting, and being granted the commercial power it offers.

Still, he adds, “By and large, most of the writing life consists in isolation” and “prizes come and prizes go”.

In the book, three interwoven strands are played out over 400 chapterless pages.

Audrey Dearth, a working-class girl from Fulham, born in 1890, is a munitions worker at the Woolwich Arsenal. She falls victim to the encephalitis lethargica sleeping sickness epidemic at the end of the First World War.

Maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner arrives at Friern Hospital in north London, having abandoned his RD Laing-influenced experiment in running a therapeutic community.

Realising Audrey is just one of a number of post-encephalitics scattered throughout the asylum, Busner attempts to bring them back to life.

Through Audrey’s older brother, Albert, a brilliant mathematician who ran the Woolwich Arsenal, and her younger brother, Stanley, based on Self’s great-uncle, come questions about technological revolution and illness.

“The starting point was this observation that the symptoms of encephalitis lethargic – this weird epidemic that swept Europe towards the end of the First World War – the symptoms of it seemed remarkably congruent with the impact of technology on the human body, of machines.

“The human body in the grip of this palsy, this shaking illness, seemed to be like a human being gripping a piece of mechanical equipment. I started to think in terms of a victim of the illness being a personification of the coming age of the machine.

Everything radiates out from that like some kind of shockwave.

It chimes with the title, Umbrella.

“It is in there symbolically. You can think of the text as having this visual analogue.

“I also thought the umbrella as an example of technology was a curiously straddling artefact. It was something that has been around for a long time, but then it became a mass-produced item around the turn of the 19th century, manufactured in bulk, and it became much cheaper.

“Yet it always had this strange character of being at once an indispensible artefact and a highly forgettable one, which is summed up in the epigraph from Joyce: ‘A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.’”

He adds there is also a kind of pattern to the text formed by the mechanical action of opening an umbrella and the sense of an umbrella being blown backwards by a wind of events.

He was interested in the impact of modernity, especially from a London/ Brighton perspective. He set the story in early 20th-century London, with its deep-level electric tube system, instant stock market quotations by telegraph from Wall Street and the Paris Bourse, and electric light – all the pertinences of the modern city as we understand it.

“And the enormous psychological watershed of the First World War, which itself is an astonishing technological feat. The Western Front was a 300-mile long production line of mechanised death.”

Self, who started injecting heroin at 17, was sent to see a shrink by his mother, a Jewish American who worked as a publisher’s assistant, when she discovered his lifestyle.

He says had he never visited a psychiatrist, he probably would not have written so frequently of their practices.

“The late teens and early 20s is the great cubicle of most people’s creative thinking. That is when you are on the cusp of adult life. You are at the beginnings of an adult perspective on things, but you still feel things with the absolute freshness of somebody who has never experienced them before.

“I always say to young people that young people are way more nostalgic than older people because they have so little past, so they cherish it.

“They always say, ‘Ooh, I remember last year.’ You know, at my age, last year seems like a week ago.

“My kids [he has four] always joke, ‘When did you last see so and so?’ and I’ll say last week, and they’ll say, ‘What, about six years ago?’”

“So yeah, all the books I read at that time and the experiences I had, some of which were quite extreme, provided me with a creative wellspring for the next 30 years.”

• Will Self will be at BHASVIC, Dyke Road, Hove, on Friday, September 21. Starts 6.30pm, £8, with a free glass of wine served from 6pm. Call 01273 725306