Interview - Will Self: Self belief on the road to a long goodbye

A prodigious reader from an early age – he was devouring the works of Turgenev at a time when most of us were getting to grips with the Diaries of Adrian Mole – his literary career has been no less prolific.

As well as writing 13 novels, he has penned six works of non-fiction, including his post millennial meditations on the vexed relationship between psyche and place in our globalised world with gonzo artist Ralph Steadman.

Self's ability to perform literary acrobatics reaches new heights in his latest book, Walking to Hollywood, which pushes the boundaries of travel book and memoir to the limits of invention.

It revolves around a seemingly disparate triptych that burrows through the intersections of time, place and psyche to explore some of our deepest fears, and is written with Self's characteristic jagged humour.

The first of these tales, Very Little, is ostensibly an account of a journey to Canada and the United States which soon draws the reader into Self's absurd "fantasia on the sublime themes of the very big and the very little".

In the second part, he describes his 120-mile Los Angeles circumambulation, which led to abduction by Scientologists and mortal combat with the reanimated corpse of Walt Disney.

Then the tone changes in the third act, Spurn Head, in which Self, or an imagined version of himself, takes a 35-mile journey along the East Yorkshire coast from Bridlington, that becomes a dark rumination on life, memory and mortality.

In lesser hands, such outlandish conceits would quickly unravel but Self has the ability to pull them off.

While there are moments in the book that have you scrambling to re-read the previous paragraph to remember where you are, there are passages that are not only brilliantly clever, but deeply moving.

Self, who is appearing In Conversation at the Ilkley Literature Festival next week, says it wasn't his intention to try and subvert a literary genre.

"Normally, I set out to write something but this was much more organically built up and each part was conceived separately.

"I started by trying to write something essayistic about this 120-mile walk through LA and, in the event, I couldn't say what I wanted to say in that format so I embellished it. But it was a real journey."

Walking to Hollywood is arguably Self's most ambitious book to date, although he has never been one to shy away from experimenting with narrative and genre. "All of my fiction tries to suspend people's disbelief, whether it's about a world controlled by apes, or cab drivers writing versions of the Bible."

He also plays around visually. The book is littered with digital photographs which, while appearing random and mundane, "pinion what is, at times, a fantastical narrative to reality".

Like most of his work, it is anchored to contemporary culture which, he believes, is in a "state of flux" right now.

"For people of my age, films were a collective experience, they were something special, they were a treat. But this has been lost, it's been Balkanised – the average young person has four screens on them at any one time, in their pockets, on their wrists, so they don't have to go to the cinema.

"I'm not bemoaning this but it has happened – movies aren't important in the way they were."

Books, too, face an uncertain future.

"The novel isn't dead, but the book is under threat in various ways. We need a dominant culture because humankind needs a collective narrative."

Self is admired as a writer for his caustic wit and wordplay. But there are many people who recognise him for his TV appearances on shows like Grumpy Old Men and Have I Got News For You. Does this bother him? "Yes and no," is his suitably ambiguous response.

"In many ways, TV is a glib medium, it reduces a lot of things. People's conception of notoriety is disturbed, the old kind of reticence seems to have evaporated.

"The idea that you can be stopped in the street is not only permissible, it's demanded, and there is this belief that by being a public figure you have abrogated the right to privacy, which I find irksome."

Ultimately, though, it is writing, and, in particular, fiction, that allows him to engage with the world.

"Kazuo Ishiguro said that a writer spends the first half of their career saying 'hi' and the second half saying 'bye', and I've reached the stage where I've started saying 'goodbye'."

Hopefully, it will be a long one.

Walking to Hollywood, published by Bloomsbury, is out now, priced 17.99.

Will Self is appearing "In Conversation" at the Ilkley Literature Festival, on October 11. Box office: 01943 816714.