The problem with titling a book psychogeography is that sooner or later people are going to ask what psychogeography is. What’s more, they are going to ask someone who has read the book, which is the sword hanging above the head of any fool naïve enough to review the thing. The problem is not so much in answering the initial question. Rather, it comes with inevitable follow up, formulated while the garbled answer to the first dribbles from the mouth. After the what comes the why. ‘Ah, so if that is what psychogeography is…’ they reply, ‘then what is it for?’.

The get out clause for the questions is to say that psychogeography means many things to many people, and so has many uses. At its broadest and basest, psychogeography is about the confluence of people and place; the manner in which our environment impacts upon us and vice versa. In the preface to this anthology of his and Ralph Steadman’s weekly newspaper columns, Will Self helpfully maps out the most prominent psychogeographers writing today. The most notable of these are probably Peter Ackroyd, who ‘practises a “phrenology” of London. He feels up the bumps of the city and so defines its character and proclivities’ and Iain Sinclair, who has doggedly used his ‘trebuchet of prose-poetry’ to lay siege to the ‘concrete bastions’ of the M25 and make capitalists abandon their cars and run screaming. Self also cites his friend Nick Papadimitriou, who pursues ‘what he prefers to term ’deep topography’: minutely detailed, multi-level examinations of select locales that impact upon the writer’s own microscopic inner-eye’.

Against these, what is Self’s psychogeography? The opening salvo from the first of his columns (reprinted here) landed him in Private Eye’s Media Balls column: ‘I’ve taken to long-distance walking as a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical geography’. Iain Sinclair called it walking about the South Downs with a pipe.

A less snake-oily statement of intent is posited in the introduction to the major 20,000 word essay that comprises the first sixth of the book, documenting a walk Self undertook in late 2006 from central London to Heathrow, then JFK to Manhattan. A product of British and American parentage, he resolved to walk to New York to explore, and in doing so hoped to ‘suture up one of the wounds in my own, divided psyche: to sew together my American and my English flesh, my mother’s and father’s body, sundered by marriage, rived by death’.

Self is walking from the city where he lives to the city where his mother died. Perhaps the best part of the work concerns his journey through London, a location to which Self is intimately attached. The journey is recounted district by district. The reader is a passenger in Self’s black cab, speeding through wastelands until we reach an area or landmark of significance, at which point the cab slows down and we crane our necks trying to get a good view before we zoom off again. All the while Self is a glorious cab driver, leaning over his shoulder with a steady stream of observation, argument and aphorism.

This is an essay addressing history, politics and society, and in this respect there is much on which to gorge. But this is also an account of a deeply personal trip - biography as street map. At one point, standing atop Richmond Park with a panorama over London, Self sees: ‘New London, city of the topmost property prices … a golden drop of sunlight in the gleam of the Swiss Re: Tower … and the inverted pool table of Battersea Power Station … the Hampstead massif and the Telecom Tower … my life, entire, in a single saccade’. The problem is that the personal significance of the sights contained in that single saccade is difficult to convey totally, even by a writer of Self‘s calibre. Which is to say that while he stands atop Richmond Park, gazing at his life expressed in a skyline, we are essentially left loitering at his side twiddling our thumbs and hoping that it’s not going to rain.

When the writing hits its stride, it becomes enough just to look out the window of the cab and enjoy the ride, and phrases like ‘the aureoles of her dirigible breasts’, or observations such as, ‘From the entrance to the subway there comes a great meaty, oily, burnt-dust afflatus; down there, New York is moving its bowels, peristaltically pushing its populace through snaking colons and sooty back passages’. In addition to these bumptious sentences, there are the words themselves. Self may be described as a writer who will use heifer over cow. Throughout the book we get words like: egress, poltroon, diaphanous, winnow, espalier, tocsin. The cab’s windows are tinted.

Long before Self got this commission, Guy Debord recorded that the term ‘psychogeography’ had a pleasing vagueness about it. In the fifty or so articles that comprise the rest of the book, psychogeography is a piece of muslin loosely draped over sketches from the writer’s imagination: bits on tea and fags; a quasi-anecdote about shooting a BBC documentary in India; a visit to a place called Foulness; a short essay on how Spain, rather than Space, is the Final Frontier; some reporting on the peasant worship of Rainare, the God of Cheap Plane Flights. Each one is written in a tone suggesting the writer wears a poker face and the reader a raised eyebrow. Each is accompanied with a illustration by Ralph Steadman, illustrations that when taken together would have alone been worth the price of the book.

It should be noted that the articles were originally produced for the magazine section of the Saturday Independent, an accompaniment to the cafetieres and croissants of a comfortable person’s comfortable morning. This is not a criticism, but to say that anthologising the columns in a book introduced by a discursion on the meaning of psychogeography could, to some readers, conscript the pieces for an end to which they were not intended. It should be made perfectly clear: Psychogeography is not a socio-political tract but a pot of (skunk laden) potpourri.

Ultimately, the columns collected here offer short bursts of pleasure to be picked over for months. But before that, Psychogeography injects the reader with an urgent desire to close the book, locate a pair of well worn boots and head outside for a long, rambling, meandering walk.