Author Will Self is on his way to the Birmingham Book Festival, but he won't be walking, he tells Lorne Jackson.

How to describe the dulcet tones of Will Self?

The first thing that comes to mind is Winnie the Pooh’s glum chum, Eeyore.

Though there is more than a speck of irony in the novelist’s deadpan delivery. He is a very droll donkey, indeed.

I also catch a hint of Edwardian gent, insouciantly lounging behind a curtain of pipe smoke in an exclusive London club.

Though a pipe was never Will’s dabble of delight.

He may be in possession of a voice that is majestically moody, arch and well-heeled.

But Self, who is appearing at this year’s Birmingham Book Festival, is well acquainted with the wrong side of the tracks.

Or do I mean motorway?

As an undergraduate at Oxford, he got a temporary job as a road-sweeper.

“I was sweeping one section of a dual carriageway called the Hendon Way,” he recalls. “Mostly it was very dull. I was off my tits on speed at the time, while people were just driving past me in their bloody cars.

“They were speeding, I was on speed. It was a bit nightmarish, actually.”

Self’s prior predilection for illicit substances is well documented.

In 1997 a broadsheet hired him to cover John Major’s election campaign.

He was sacked when it was discovered that he enlivened the empty drudgery and endless trudgery of that futile tilt at Number 10 by taking heroin on the Prime Minister’s jet.

Fourteen years on and those days of Self abuse are a thing of the past. He is now intent on healthier pursuits, and has a passion for walking.

Though let’s get this straight. Self does not stroll. Or amble. Or ramble. (Okay, maybe some rambling. Though only in his prose.)

The walking is in the shape of a spiritual quest. An intellectual exercise rather than mere exercise.

Walking To Hollywood, his latest book, is ostensibly a description of three walks he undertook through parts of Canada, America and England.

It’s an exceedingly malleable memoir, stretching the limits of credibility, with fact and fantasy gleefully blended. Any interest in the passing landscape is trumped by his fascination with the inner terrain of his imagination, which is fired by gloomy meditations on life, death and art.

As far as Self is concerned, wandering means wondering.

For his talk at the book festival, he’ll be arguing that dawdling along life’s highways is more intellectually stimulating than driving.

Does this mean he’ll be walking to the event at Birmingham Cathedral?

“I’ll be coming from Sheffield, so I don’t suppose I will be walking,” he says. Then adds, rather tetchily, “I don’t walk, everywhere, any more than you do.

“I’m talking about cars, anyway, rather than walking.

“I hate the expression on people’s faces when they’re driving. Have you noticed how they grimace as if they’re making a muscular effort when they’re driving a car?

“A few years ago, before there was power steering, there might have been some justification for that. But now it’s just a function of how people completely identify with their cars in a sort of physical level.”

Self’s refusal to march the many miles from Sheffield to Brum seems perfectly sensible, though he has undertaken equally challenging hikes.

In Walking To Hollywood he pounds the miles from Canada’s Pearson Airport to central Toronto.

And stomps across San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge into Sausalito. Then hikes the East Coast of Yorkshire.

“I also did the 120 miles circumambulation of Los Angeles,” he reminds me.

LA’s residents are well known for their emotional attachment to their cars. Did the locals consider this unrepentant walker in their midst to be a wackjob?

Apparently not.

“You’ve got to remember that Los Angeles is the city that prides itself on adventurousness and eccentricity more than any other in the world.

“Nobody really thought I was doing anything particularly strange. Besides, there are sidewalks everywhere and it’s a very congenial city to walk in. No rain, nice weather.

“California’s suburbia is much more various than it is in, for example, Birmingham.

“Every house is different to the one alongside it. There’s a sort of Spanish style house, then a fake Tudor house, followed by a Roman villa.

“It’s quite nice walking through all of that.”