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WILL Self’s latest has its roots in a former Independent Magazine column called "Psychogeography". That column, in turn, was a journalistic enactment of the idea—forged by mid-20th-century Leftist cultural theorists—that to walk through the modern environment is a radical act, capable of disrupting the false consciousness imposed on us by capitalist drudgery. All three stories in the triptych that forms Walking to Hollywood, then, see Self on foot, in search of metaphysical truth. The result is a work full of his trademark hypertensive invention, but less effective than it might have been. Walking to Hollywood is styled as a "memoir pushed to the limits of invention". But this —as with so much here—is really a smiling deception; the book is a surreal fiction that makes use of the increasingly popular author-as-protagonist. In Very Little, Self recounts his relationship with the egomaniacal sculptor and "person of restricted height" Sherman Oaks. In the long, dream-like centrepiece, Walking to Hollywood, a disturbed Self walks across LA. Soon it becomes clear to him, however, that he is an involuntary actor in a movie, and that every person he meets is played by a Hollywood star. Finally, in Spurn Head, Self walks the coastline of east Yorkshire and plays checkers with Death. There is a sense in which Walking to Hollywood feels a natural end point for Self. He has always been the overarching presence in his fiction, and the author/protagonist dispenses with any residual need to speak through a fictional character, allowing his own famous (or infamous) loquaciousness a new fluidity. An airport travelator, then, is free to be a "grooved tongue glistening as if with saliva". Without plot or a fully realised inner life, the pleasures of Walking to Hollywood should reside in satire. But Self is leaning hard on the obsession with celebrity that he sets out to satirise. Is he not depending on the idea that we will be thrilled by the appearance of Scooby-Doo, or Jamie Foxx? Soon enough, it’s he who seems over-enamoured of celebrity culture. Self might have dared to present us with an entirely different account of the journeys that informed this book: an exploration of his private, psychic unease in the face of what he has called "the man machine matrix" would have made for a less flashy, but potentially fascinating work. Here, we have the CGI version: glittering, but all surface. — By arrangement with The Independent
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