Facing a one-in-five chance of dying during a stem cell transplant for blood cancer - odds slightly worse than Russian roulette - Will Self realised that, having spent most of his life in Zone Two, he might well die in Zone One. Some people, confronted by such a prospect, might travel somewhere exotic. Self chose instead to go deeper than ever before into the ancient, strange and haunted metropolis of his birth.
Walking outwards through London in the four cardinal directions, Self passes beyond the familiar city of Dickens and Holmes into the vast suburban expanse that surrounds it, where ethnic succession, speculative development and buried histories have continually remade the capital.
These ambulations also lead backwards, into Self's childhood in the Jewish enclave of Hampstead Garden Suburb, and beyond it into the life and work of his father, Peter Self, one of the 1960s 'activators' who helped make the contemporary built environment, for good or ill. The result is a matryoshka doll of suburban experience: the son walking through landscapes the father theorised and planned, while excavating the family life concealed inside their model garden suburb.
Combining memoir, history, psychogeography and polemic,
Et in Suburbia Ego is both a paean and profound meditation - and the book Self's readers have long been waiting for.
