Walking to Hollywood is a dazzling triptych – obsessive, satirical, elegiac – in which Will Self burrows down through the intersections of time, place and psyche to explore some of our deepest fears and anxieties with characteristic fearlessness and jagged humour.
‘Very Little’ is ostensibly the account of a curative journey to Canada and the USA, but in fact the record of a nematode’s progress, as the worm of obsession – with scale and packing and the ‘stuff’ of our lives – bores through a mind in extremesis.
‘Walking to Hollywood’ is an extreme satire on celebrity, in which the narrator believes that everyone he meets is played by a famous actor, and that only he can solve the mystery of who murdered the movies.
‘Spurn Head’ leads Self to a tormented sojourn with a madman whose house is sliding over the edge of a cliff, to a game of checkers with Death, and finally to an encounter with one of Swift’s immortal Struldbruggs and a march through a tear in time itself.
In Walking to Hollywood Will Self pushes memoir to the limits of invention.
