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The Butt
 
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The Butt (Hardcover)

by Will Self (Author)
2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
List Price: CDN$ 27.50
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Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. From Self, the British master of the satirical fantasy, comes a loquacious and inventive farce about the demise of civilization. Tom Brodzinski, relaxing on vacation in the postcolonial Feltham Islands, sets off a string of unfortunate events when he flicks a cigarette butt off his hotel balcony. It lands on the scalp of tourist Reginald Lincoln III. Reggie's happy to laugh it off, but things slide from bad to worse when Reggie is hospitalized and Tom is charged with assault with a projectile weapon with a toxic payload. After a chaotic trial, Tom is ordered to pay a restitution of two good hunting riffles, a set coking pots and $10,000. The catch is that the restitution needs to take place in the tribal heartland. This launches Tom and Brian Prentice, another foreign transgressor (Tom suspects pedophilia), on an expedition of Conradian proportions during which Tom is tormented by Brian's rotten, cloacal physicality. Self (The Book of Dave; How the Dead Live; etc.) confirms his reputation for pulling off cleverly modeled literary experiments. This one is at times exhausting, but if you can stick with him, Self successfully presents an ironic and timely metaphor for our post-9/11 Bigger Brother world. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


Product Description

One of contemporary fiction’s most “wickedly brilliant…endlessly talented” (Publishers Weekly) satirists delivers a dystopian novel skewering global politics and Big Brother-style government post-9/11.

When Tom Brodzinksi tries to give up smoking, he inadvertently sets off a chain of events that threaten to upset the tenuous balance of peace in a not-too-distant land. When he flips the butt of his final cigarette off the balcony of his vacation apartment, it lands on elderly Reggie Lincoln, lounging on the balcony below. Lincoln suffers a burn, and the local authorities charge Tom with assault—in a country with draconian anti-smoking laws, a cigarette is a weapon of offense. For reparation, Tom must leave his family behind and wander through the arid center of the country’s deserted territory. Joining Tom on his journey is Brian Prentice, a mysteriously sinister presence, who has his own sins to make up for. Inevitably, the two men encounter violence, forcing them to come together despite their seething mistrust. A profoundly disturbing allegory, The Butt reveals the heart of a distinctly modern darkness.

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2.0 out of 5 stars We throw butts away, Nov 22 2008
Think of the phrase, where there's smoke there's fire and recall that the first smoke of the book is extinguished and tossed from a balcony. That's a warning.

I'm a real fan of Will Self but this book is downright uncharacteristic of what I expect from Self in terms of imaginative writing. Similar is the way Homes' The End of Alice (a brilliant read) then became a dull plodding regular, average work in This Book Will Save Your Life. It's as though something happens, the effort spent in writing the really good book is lost and the next one is a writer's holiday or something.

In a way his style here is closest to what he used for Tough Tough Toys. The main character tosses his butt, it burns onto the head of a man below, and our protagonist, if we want to call him that because our identification with him is shallow, is dragged through a tale he has little control over. Things get worse, of course, as though he were the Vicar of Wakefield and the sole purpose of plot is to make things worse. Yeah, it's outdated except in Hollywood. So he gets stuck on a vacation island due to little known laws send fingers across lands, so if he were to merely leave the island people have a right to destroy his belongings up to the two million dollar bond. It sounds a bit like Mark Leyner's "New Jersey State Discretionary Execution Program." I found myself wondering if Self is making fun of peoples of color generally, or whether he understands the implications of his words as he discusses those who inhabit the island since there are a few very stereotypical cliches at use -- he could follow them up to make a point about capitalist society and visible minorities or first versus third world peoples but he doesn't.

Most shocking is the way the book offers so little. Self has admitted he's weak on plot and here it shows more than ever. You really need to force yourself to stick with this one, but afterwords you wonder why you kept at it. Maybe this is the joke, we're held prisoner too, in a little island called a book. You title a book Butt and you seem to ask for a whole lot of jokes at your expense (you get my drift). This one deserves a kicking or to be tossed into the ashtray, the way we treat most butts.
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