Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

I felt an obscure shame about the murder — or, rather, about my detachment from the immediate environment, let alone the wider world. I wasn’t remotely interested in the morality tale used to impose ‘sense’ on this young man’s death; I thought instead of the city, its anonymity, its crisscross currents of physical mortality and psychic violence. Over the preceding few years I had a growing sense of the room where I typed being encircled by homicides: the woman whose smouldering corpse was found in the local park — the victim of an ‘honour’ killing; the young woman strangled in her workplace shower down the road in Vauxhall; the kid shot in his flat at Clapham North by gang members; the doorman of a club on the Wandsworth Road shot in a driveby; and, of course, the young Brazilian electrician shot by police seven times at point-blank range in the nearby tube station.

All works of fiction represent terrains across which characters travel, and while the writer maps these he is down there on the ground, orienting by compass — whether moral or otherwise — and the familial resemblances of faces, landmarks and geographical features. Only towards the end of the journey, when he climbs the last hill, does he look back to survey the entire territory; only then does he understand the nature of the particular route undertaken.

When I reached the end of this book — so contorted, wayward and melancholic — I looked back and saw my father-in-law’s death from cancer in November 2007, Freddy Moody’s murder in July 2008, and the death of J. G. Ballard in April of 2009. The mental pathologies that underlie the three memoirs — obsessive-compulsive disorder for ‘Very Little’, psychosis for ‘Walking to Hollywood’ and Alzheimer’s for ‘Spurn Head’ — are themselves displacements of a single phenomenon.

W. W. S., London, 2009

Will Self is the author of six short-story collections, a book of novellas, eight novels, and six collections of journalism. His short story collection Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys won the Paris Review ’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction in 1998, How the Dead Live was shortlisted for the Whitebread Novel of the Year 2002, and The Butt won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2008. He lives in London.