In his last novel, ‘The Book of Dave’, Will Self conceived a satirical fantasy world loosely based on contemporary reality and sent his characters, including a repellent, aggressive male, on a whimsical, absurdist road trip. Having pulled it off there, he’s tried exactly the same thing again in ‘The Butt’, but with diminishing returns.
‘The Butt’ is set on a vast island-continent with a fecund coast, colonised by Anglos and serviced by pliant tribesmen, and a desert centre, devastated by insurgents of diverse ethnicity waging a vicious internecine war. Into this dark heart (and the Conrad references are as explicit as those to Swift, Lévi-Strauss and Ballard) travels Tom Brodzinski, an unpleasant, naive and confrontational American who casually flicks a cigarette butt over his hotel balcony, then spends the rest of the novel childishly kicking against the consequences.
Self presents the book as an allegory of the liberal West post-9/11, and the allusions to Iraq are clear. But ‘The Butt’ drags as fiction and confuses as satire, lurching from set-piece to set-piece, each more overburdened than the last with the need to act both as political metaphor and as a platform for Self to showcase his imaginative flair. The result is a world too fantastical to be credible and populated by implausible ciphers. Many of the themes are lost amid the detail, although as ever Self’s firecracker stylisms make it worth pursuing to the close.
|
|
|
|
The best of London in your inbox
Up to the minute picks of the best things to do in London, delivered to your desktop.
|
|
