Book Review: Walking to Hollywood, Will Self
THERE is no doubt that Will Self is an exceptionally talented writer - his pyrotechnic vocabulary, his giddying imagination and sardonic, clear-eyed tone have always been evident on every page. There remains a suspicion, however, that he didn't quite have a form in which to contain these copious gifts. Walking To Hollywood strikes me as the most successful book he has written, and it establishes, perhaps, what kind of writer Self actually is: a modern-day Jonathan Swift. He has the satirist's interest in exaggeration, distortion, snarling anger and linguistic verve, but more seriously, he is serious. There is a deeply moral core to Walking To Hollywood, and a raw emotional quality his previous fictions may have repressed or sublimated.
Ostensibly, this is a memoir of three walks: a Canadian book tour and associated jaunts with a conceptual artist, "Sherman Oaks"; an account of Self's walk from his London home, via Pinewood Studios and a transatlantic flight, to Hollywood (where Self attempts to determine who murdered the cinema as an art form); and a final walk along the crumbling Bridlington coastline, a place so gnawed by erosion that the journey would be "impossible for anyone ever to make again. By the time another year had passed the solid ground that had risen up to meet my feet would have disappeared forever".
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Hide AdBut it's a memoir that Self manipulates and slaps around as if the genre were made from the same pliable material as Daffy Duck's features. So, in Hollywood, Self discovers he has superpowers, transforms into the Hulk, grows Laura Harring's breasts and is hunted down by Scientologists; on the Yorkshire coast he meets one of Swift's pitiably immortal Struldbruggs and somebody does something unspeakable with Margaret Atwood's patented LongPen in Toronto.
Each section also has a totemic mental illness - obsessive-compulsive disorder, paranoid psychosis and amnesia - which is translated stylistically as repetitions, as mnemonic games, and as the hilarious but horrifying conviction that "Self" is played by Pete Postlethwaite or David Thewliss, and everyone he meets is also an actor (so Bret Easton Ellis is actually a young Orson Welles, and a tramp is Salman Rushdie). The fantastic elements are, curiously, the realistic depiction of mental illness.
Mortality hangs heavily over Walking To Hollywood, and Self is unflinching in the face of it. An epiphany at Spurn Head is not that he wants a longer life, but that he wants to live forever. He even includes a photograph of his naked body, and no reviewer could be as lacerating on Self as he is on himself: "Sherman" lashes his "micro-satires, dirty doodlings in the margins of history".The walks almost seem like a frantic form of impetus: part fleeing Cain, part wandering Jew condemned to pace the earth till Doomsday.
That is not to say that it is either a morbid or a depressing read: quite the contrary. There is an awful glee, which reminded me of Nietzsche's aphorism that the thought of suicide has kept many a man alive through the night.
Almost every page has a description or a turn of phrase so memorable and arresting that, as Self powers across the blistered landscapes of post-industrial ruin, the reader lingers. He can conjure phrases like "a Zoloft of interiors", pharmaceutical products are named after "the bastard offspring of a Turkish fisherman and a planet-eating robot", Self's "smouldering feet are stubbed out", and there are "incisors the size of dentists". His ability to say and having something profound to say have finally aligned.
This article first appeared in Scotland on Sunday, September 12, 2010