Walking to Hollywood by Will Self

Previously published in Dawn Books & Authors. 

It would be easy to write Will Self off by describing him as a writer who knows a great many big, complicated words and often writes as if he is still a drug addict with a horribly meandering mind. But easy isn’t what anything associated with Will Self should be – that’s just misleading in every way. Self is an aggressive, aware and anarchistic writer: he is complicated and hyper intelligent – nothing he writes could ever be simplified so easily. His latest book, Walking to Hollywood, is a strange mix of fiction and memoir, one that Self describes as ‘a cross between a comic farce and an intense misery memoir…it’ll make you feel profoundly alienated and yet tittering at the same time’. Profoundly alienated – yes, but many times a reader may be too confused to laugh.

Just as Self’s hero J.G Ballard saw ‘terror and poetry’ simultaneously in the urban landscape, Self too chose to write ‘psychogeography’ a few years ago. What began as a column for The Independent ended up taking over much of Self’s work – he would simply walk larger than usual distances, feel things, see things and then write about them. Sounds simple, but once again, nothing Self-ish ever is. Walking to Hollywood occasionally (particularly at its start) has the tonality of a memoir, even going as far as including photographs taken by the writer that suggest that all this is nonfiction. Soon it is clear that Self is playing very effectively with the unreliability of the memoir – even an actual memoir is, after all, simply one person’s entirely skewed perspective.

The book is three linked pieces, each narrated in the first person by the author-protagonist himself. Self admits himself that the book is ‘contorted, wayward and melancholic’, and that certain mental pathologies underlie each memoir – obsessive-compulsive disorder for ‘Very Little’ (about a childhood friend who was a ‘little person’ and a world famous installation artist); psychosis for ‘Walking to Hollywood’ (‘I want to find out who killed film—for film is definitely dead … I don’t know if film was murdered—but I suspect there’s a killer out there’); and Alzheimer’s for ‘Spurn Head’ (fear of early onset dementia colours a visit to the Yorkshire coastline). The piece that stands out the most is the titular one, where Self really lets his mind wander and his words soar as he submits to the surreal landscape of Los Angeles which seems to practically beg for a large dose of Gonzo style writing. The influence of Hunter S. Thomson is clear, particularly since this piece often reads like a drug-induced nightmare. In fact, the USedition of Walking to Hollywood even has a cover entirely based on the current US paperback cover for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Self has traveled to Hollywood to find out how film has died as a narrative art form, and his own narrative is heavily laced with the language of film – phrases like the 30 degree rule, a random character called ‘Mac Guffin’, sound stages, release forms, blue screen, Super 8 – its clear that he doesn’t care whether his readers know what he’s talking about or not, even when it is a matter of vocabulary, let alone his thought process, or characters like Dr. Mukti and Dr. Busner from his earlier work. Of course, it is been twenty years since his first collection of stories, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, and it is safe to assume that his huge readership would expect nothing less than to be at least a little befuddled.

Self’s wildly varying and surreal cast of characters in the titular piece alone include Scooby-Doo, Bret Ellis Easton (who admits he writes scripts because ‘money, dummy – I need the money’), a bag lady who resembles Toni Morrison, Justin Timberlake and Marianne Faithful. All of whom are/may be being played by actors, as perhaps Self himself is. There’s also a machine-gun fire blast of a mention of the entire Polanski disaster, L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology and a breakdown of some scenes from Bladerunner. Linear narratives be damned – Will Self will do as Will Self will do.

Walking to Hollywood is eccentric before it is anything else. It’s compulsive, driven prose is enough to draw a reader in, shroud them in asphyxiating darkness and then shove them in a completely different situation with no warning. Self is an extravagant writer fascinated by the absurd, the perverse, and the grotesque; he luxuriates in language and he never holds back at all. This isn’t Self’s greatest work – it isn’t, for instance, at the same level of work that even the great god of urban fiction JG Ballard had admired. This isn’t The Book of Dave, or How the Dead Live or Great Apes – it is as manic, as insane and as fascinated by the grotesque as those earlier novels, but Walking to Hollywood is an entirely different animal even then, more feral, more rabid and more concerned with its own survival.