Will Self cuts a louche, bony figure as he saunters into Sheffield Hallam University’s Pennine Auditorium, carrying a tray of sandwiches like an aloof waiter sneering at the diners beneath him. This elaborate prop goes unexplained while he scrutinises the audience and remarks on our eerily near perfect distribution amongst the vast quantity of seats. After a diversion into scattering theory he confides in us that the good people from Off the Shelf have provided him not only with his ‘rider’ of Earl Grey tea and water but also this bread-based spread. Being a sophisticated Londoner with a de rigeur wheat intolerance he’s not interested and instead shares them with us in an impromptu loaves and fishes miracle.
These theatrical touches are what make this evening with Will Self such a pleasure. Far from delivering an identikit book tour spiel you sense that he approaches each gig like a stand-up comic – riffing off circumstance, chasing bizarre tangents and terrorising latecomers. In fact it’s some time before Self even picks up the book he’s nominally here to promote, his 2010 memoir Walking to Hollywood. First we hear something of his journey to Sheffield. If you ever take a train with Will Self be prepared for him to interrogate you on the wisdom of taking more luggage with you than you can physically carry – the scourge of the wheeled suitcase – and heaven forefend you should have a mobile phone conversation next to him. His response to such a liberty is to start reading aloud from his book with the justification, ‘you’re monologuing, I’m monologuing.’
Perhaps it’s the grimness of public encounters on public transport which has lead Self to his passion for walking. A twenty first century flaneur, he bucks convention by walking long distances, not just on traditionally scenic routes but often in the strange no man’s land between cities. He’s even on occasion walked to airports to catch flights, a fairly extreme means of avoiding car parking and shuttle fees. In Walking to Hollywood he narrates one such odyssey, this time walking the circumference of the Los Angeles basin, a total anathema to car-obsessed Americans.
Self really did undertake this walk however, his telling of it in this dark, delirious and verbose memoir is highly fictionalised and fantastical. In the extracts he reads us we hear of a bloody contretemps with Daniel Craig on a Bond set, his suicidal jump from the Golden Gate Bridge and a grisly scene in service station in which Self chastises a discourteous pump attendant by stuffing him with pick & mix like a human piñata. His prose is rich with the psychogeography of Ian Sinclair and the grotesque gonzoism of Hunter S. Thompson, but his voice is uniquely Selfian.
Confiding in the audience that he suffers from OCD it becomes clear where his obsessive punning and tortuous linguistic play comes from. Also haunting the text is a fractured self image made manifest in Self morphing into either David Thewlis or the late Pete Postlethwaite – he bears a passing resemblance to both men – depending on his psychological state. The work is as clever, visceral and mischievous as the author himself as he toys with the audience’s questions, never letting the truth get it the way of a good answer.
Off the Shelf continues until 29 October, find out more here.