Not being a regular reader of the UK’s Independent, the first I heard about British novelist Will Self’s walkabout habits was in a New York Times article back in 2006: then, he was attempting a walk from JFK Airport to Manhattan.
Not attempting, actually doing it. On foot. This meant bypassing the highway and instead crossing through neighborhoods, housing projects, all the overlooked enclaves and bits of detritus that people normally try to avoid when going from Point A to Point B.
Self is an amateur psychogeographer: he’s interested in the ways our geographical environment impinges on our emotions and behavior. He believes our urban lives — usually traveling within the steel and glass bubble of a motor vehicle — have imposed a “windscreen virtuality” to our experience of our surroundings. So he likes to take long walks and write about what he sees. “Psychonavigation,” Self’s regular Independent column from 2003 to 2008, took his theory out in the field — sometimes, literally, out into fields. With British illustrator Ralph Steadman providing visual counterpoint to his short essays, the whole expedition took on a Hunter S. Thompson vibe — minus the drugs and the candy-apple-red convertible. (Self, himself, is a recovering heroin addict and alcoholic.) In fact, it was probably the exact opposite of journeys like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, because Self’s spin was that you didn’t need drugs to become completely disoriented — or stimulated — by your environment.
What lifts this sequel to Self’s earlier collection, Psychonavigation, above a mere rehash of newspaper columns is the 73-page, previously unpublished essay that opens the book. In “Walking to The World,” we learn of Self’s literary debt to J.G. Ballard, the writer who spectacularly fused man and machine in fictional worlds such as Crash and High Rise. At the time of writing, Ballard was dying; Self decided to honor his literary hero by charting a special bipedal journey: from Heathrow Airport to Dubai’s The World, a spectacularly lavish recreation of earth’s land masses as luxury residential units. (No, he didn’t walk all the way; Self strolled to the airport from Ballard’s home in Shepperton, took a plane to Dubai, and — following the rudimentary maps he could dig up plus satellite photo printouts from Google Earth — made his way by foot to his destination.)
It’s a fascinating account, giving Self plenty of opportunity to skewer the extravagance of Dubai and its ruler, Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum, a man with an edifice-complex to rival even Imelda’s, just as the real estate bubble was about to pop (circa late 2009). He heads out from his Dubai hotel to locate The World, a “bizarre artificial archipelago” made to resemble the seven continents, with various nations etched out of the surrounding imported waters in the middle of the desert. Not a theme park, these are parcels of land built into luxury condos. Self finds much to kick at here:
The entire coastline of Dubai was revealed to me wreathed in its brownish smogosphere; from the downtown blocks around the creek, to the pinnacles of Downtown Dubai and the bodkin of its Burj, to the maggoty Burj Al Arab and then along to the sky infestation of the Dubai Marina development. That, I thought, is the world in all its teeming, besmirched obsolescence, while up ahead is The World: deserted, and pristine, a bas-relief planet.
What Self resembles, really, is a modern-day Jonathan Swift: his conscience comes through in wicked jabs, satirical swipes. But he’s also not above lambasting himself, so the medicine goes down a little easier. His essays are packed with amusing little insights — like the way Americans have somehow, over the years, come to pronounce the word Route as “rout” instead of “root.” (How did that happen?) He is alarmed, too, by the presence of Mississippi Delta crayfish in the Thames, “sucked up into the ballast tanks of oceangoing US freighters, then purged into the treacly waters of the Thames estuary,” where they “gobble up aquatic palms and fish eggs, doing everything they can to de-oxygenate the water, making it fit only for themselves. Bastards.”
He does have larger things to say — about avian flu (“Flu Away”), prophesizing the day when the virus won’t require fowl to spread, finding plenty of opportunity on transcontinental human carriers (“Woosh! HN15, you are cleared for landing.”); about unionized Europe and its salary gaps (in “Plenty of Room in the Asylum”); about what the existence of hermits in the modern world says about us; or how an earthquake shakes up your sense of permanent location big-time (in “The Carpet Moves”). Delivered in bite-sized morsels, these carefully wrapped missives prove Self is a witty, whirlwind essayist, but at the end of 1,000 words, you may find no major tectonic plates of thought have been internally shifted. Still, there’s plenty of food for thought, and appetizers for the thinking.
The color illustrations by Steadman — known for his work with “Gonzo” writer Thompson — add immeasurably to the enjoyment of Psycho Too, much as John Williams’ cello-driven score was half the pleasure of Jaws. In Self, Steadman seems to have a found another muse worthy of his peculiar talents.
And you’ve got to admire Self for sticking to his guns. He really does want to learn something about our relation to our surroundings (someone should challenge him to go walking in Manila sometime, say from NAIA to North EDSA; bet he’d learn quite a lot about his surroundings). He’s even more vexed by people’s incomprehension whenever he chooses to go about on foot. There’s a wistful air to some of the essays, as though Self feels compelled to slog through with his experiment, even if sometimes he himself wonders why he does it.
I explained to the hotel concierge about the walk and was met with the usual silent incredulity that, over the years, I’ve grown accustomed to. It no longer excited me, no longer made me feel privileged or subversive — it was just a drag, talking to people who didn’t really know where they were.
Fortunately we have Will Self, better even than Google Earth, to give us a ground-level view of our alien surroundings.