Walking to Hollywood

Another strange and defiant book from Will Self, to be enjoyed and endured in almost equal measure. Reading Walking to Hollywood (reading any of Self's books) can feel a bit like negotiating quick sand: the more you struggle with it, the more difficult your situation becomes. But if you treat it as experiential prose rather than prose to comprehend every last bit of, there is real pleasure to be had. It is dense and it is florid and it is 'clever', but it can also be throwaway and funny.

The three sections of this latest non-novel, 'Very Little', 'Walking to Hollywood' and 'Spurn Head' are really one extended creative, hallucinogenic memoir; difficult to follow logically but with an absurd, trippy logic. Very odd, uncredible things happen - particularly in the final section, which sometimes feels like the first draft of a Terry Gilliam screenplay - and yet the 'stories' never become so absurd or perverse that they become flights of fancy.

In fact, there is throughout Walking to Hollywood a rigorous line of social commentary and satire that skewers and celebrates celebrity culture, lampoons contemporary art, bemoans our fixation with consumption, and confronts the imminence of ecological disaster. This is a paranoid, obsessive, flippant and prophetic book, utterly in tune with these times.