Will Self: Psychogeography

Will Self's Psychogeography is a highly entertaining book and he had me laughing out loud on several occasions.  It is largely made up of a collection of his Psychogeography articles for the Independent and is superbly illustrated by Ralph Steadman who has a quirky, sometimes disturbing imagination.  The book begins, however, with a longer section detailing a walk from his South London home to Heathrow Airport and then from JFK Airport to the Crowne Plaza in Manhattan. His writing is sarcastic and lugubrious and he appears to have a jaundiced view of the world; it is easy to hear him in the imagination on the TV programme Grumpy Old Men, this is obviously a persona that he adopts.  It makes for some hilarious reading however.

He has recently written a review in the Guardian for a new travel/psychogeography  book by a young writer: Malachy Tallach called 60 Degrees North: Around the World in Search of Home; a journey around the 60th parallel.  This itself sounds a good read, but again , Self writes in his usual rather negative style, although one must assumes he enjoyed the book as he finishes, "Tallack does travelogue well, acutely balancing fact and fancy, and he has a nicely febrile line in his own vulnerability."  He cannot resist though a final sarcastic comment ".... this writer has now finished his gap year; now he must get on with the hard graft of lifelong alienation."

I find the writing of Robert MacFarlane much more joyous and uplifting with his evocative descriptions of wilderness areas.  In the review above Will Self finds a few sentences to give his views of MacFarlane.  He describes him as being one of the burgeoning group of young travel writers - of whom Robert MacFarlane is the cynosure- who have reinvigorated their increasingly tired genre with elements of psychogeography.   I like his definition of psychogeography in this article: the study of how places make us feel.

Self, W. (2015) Guardian Book of the Week Review, London, The Guardian