Will Self - Psychogeography

I think it was brave of the bride and groom to hold their wedding in Havana, because the bride comes from an Anglo-Chinese family and they must have fairly negative feelings about communism. As for the groom, well, he’s a dyed-in-the-cashmere capitalist, a true getter, so the venue must have seemed more than a tad outré. Still, he betrayed no anxiety as he ushered the guests in. There were painted ladies on stilts, a brace of conjurors, the food was noisettes of lamb, rosti, rugula salad — not quite what you expect from Cuban cuisine, but then this was Havana. . in Brighton.

Later, as the Victoria train made a lengthy detour via Haywards Heath due to engineering works on the main line, I reflected on how Graham Greene might have reacted to the wedding. It’s almost impossible to conceive of Greene visiting any kind of theme restaurant, even one as discreet as Havana. Perhaps this alone confirms that he wasn’t quite the towering genius some once thought, and also explains why his books are beginning, ever so gently, to slide out of print. It seems to me incontrovertible that nothing that is human can be strange to those creators whose works will endure, not even an Irish pub in Maputo.

Had Havana been Brighton in the 1930s it would’ve allowed Greene to kill two fictional birds with one stone. He could’ve written a novel called Our Man in Havana Rocks. . in Brighton , the action of which would concern the sad machinations of a down-at-heel British spy running a theme restaurant who is threatened by a punk gangster. If you think this is preposterous, you need to consider the fact that Greene himself never even visited Brighton. During the composition of Brighton Rock he put up at the rather more genteel Bexhill-on-Sea and sent researchers along the coast to do his legwork for him.

I don’t know why I’ve got it in for Greene at the moment — he never did anything to hurt me. Still, the revelation that, far from being an urbane globetrotter, he never got further than Sussex, while the vast bulk of his output was written in the vicinity of Clapham Common, is one I must share. It was not by accident that critics dubbed his late-colonial milieu, with its dipsomaniac expats, tormented priests and nymphomaniac natives ‘Greeneland’, because it was first and foremost a country of the mind. The Human Factor, The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American — all of them were drummed up by a fantasist who knew no more of South America, Africa or South-East Asia than a schoolboy armed with a decent atlas. Travels with my Aunt should really have been entitled Hanging Out with My Aunt , while Greene’s very first fiction, Stamboul Train , is a blatant lie, as any close reading of the text makes it perfectly clear that the train in question is travelling on the branch line from Ely to Peterborough.

Does it matter? I hear you ask. Surely it’s a very prosaic conception of fiction indeed which insists on such a factual basis? After all, even Kafka wrote a novel called Amerika without ever going there. Well, yes and yet no. I do think a sense of topography is integral to our enjoyment of fiction, and that even if we haven’t been to a place we can somehow sense whether the writer who describes it has. I remember being in Brazil (or do I?) ten years ago, and the Brazilian literary community being much exercised by John Updike, who’d just published a novel called Brazil . ‘’E was only ’ere a week! One week!’ expostulated my genial translator, Hamilton dos Santos. What he would’ve made of Terry Gilliam’s film of the same name I shudder to think, set as it was almost entirely inside the cooling tower of Chiswick Power Station.

No, when a writer’s frauds become too flagrant there can only be one solution: send them to Botany Bay. And I’m not talking New South Wales here, but Botany Bay near Enfield. This little village was dubbed by a Victorian wag who found it inconceivably far from London, and the name stuck. Graham Greene would’ve been perfectly happy in exile there penning a great Australian novel.

In February 2002 I was in India, visiting an arms fair to make a film about the death-metal trade for the BBC. It was a sensitive time. In Kashmir a million troops were massed along a euphemism, the so-called ‘Line of Control’, while the two subcontinental nuclear powers rattled their plutonium sabres with unashamed glee. It was a tense time for me, too. Before leaving London I’d visited the BBC’s medical unit, which was housed in a steel-clad, paint-by-numbers block under the lip of the Westway. Here I’d been given a galaxy of shots — for cholera, typhoid, hepatitis and God knows what else — as well a small rucksack full of malaria pills. It hardly seemed necessary for a four-day sojourn in the developing world. (Another great euphemism: if somewhere with a five-thousand-year continuous civilisation is the ‘developing’ world then what does that make Britain, the ‘foetal’ world?)

Together with the director, Amir, a charming, faun-like Anglo-Iranian, and David, the cameraman, an avuncular presence, I was holed up in a vast New Delhi hotel. Laid out on two storeys in a series of bewilderingly similar corridors and halls, the hotel reminded me of an Escher print, and as I made the trek to my room I kept expecting to see my doppelgänger disappearing around the next corner.

On the first evening we met up with our local fixer, and the four of us headed out to dinner at a restaurant of great repute. Suddenly we were plunged from the mock-oriental straight into the real thing. It was the first time I’d been in India since the 1980s and while I hadn’t forgotten the visceral impact of the place it still came as a shock when we climbed out of the taxi and met a forest of begging arms, many of them deformed. The sheer unadulterated hugger-mugger of old Delhi with its tuk-tuks, naked light bulbs, mud walls and teeming, pan-chewing humanity surged in on me like a wave. Then, sitting in the restaurant, I had a gastro-epiphany, registering the exact moment when a bacillus crawled off my fork and into my mouth. Sod it, I thought, in for a rupee in for a lakh, and I kept on eating.

The following day as we stalked the arms fair, trying to get oleaginous Department of Trade and Industry wonks and British Aerospace Systems salesmen to talk to us, my innards dissolved into a muddy flux. ‘You too?’ I squealed at Amir as we dashed between aisles of machine guns and missiles to the khazi. He nodded in pained acknowledgement. But when we both emerged he had in his hand a capsule as big as a smart bomb. ‘Take this,’ he told me. ‘The BBC gave it to me; it’s so strong that it’ll kill any known stomach bug stone dead in twenty-four hours.’

‘Why didn’t they give me one?’ I wailed petulantly.

‘Look,’ he thrust it at me, ‘I’m giving it to you now — take it!’

The next twenty-four hours saw Amir and me reach a state of considerable nervous hilarity as we attempted to interview reluctant arms traders while breaking off every ten minutes to answer the anguished howl of our diseased natures. We were reduced to spoofing the death-metal dealers — on camera — with a series of skits which we thought wildly funny:

Self: (to Swedish artillery manufacturer standing in front of a model of one of his guns) Is that the actual size of the 200mm Bofors?

Swede: Um. . no. . it would not be operational at that size.