Will Self doesn’t read fiction. He says that it is hard enough for him to suspend his disbelief long enough to write his own books, let alone having to suspend it for others. Such an effort of will, for Will, would be crippling.
But wait a minute. Since when is reading a novel so difficult? I devour novels — so long as they’re not wanky literary novels. Unfortunately, Will’s latest, The Butt, is particularly wanky, somewhat literary and virtually unreadable. It reads like the book of a writer who is all-but-incapable of suspending his own disbelief. Every character is soggy cardboard, all the scenes are made of lurid plasticine. The fact that I finished it, forcing myself to grind through ten pages per night, no matter how inebriated or jaded I felt, now feels like a remarkable achievment. Especially as the book is completely unrewarding in all other respects.
The novel is presented as an allegory of Western imperialism, a psychohistory of a man who blithely accepts the preconditions of his own existence. The butt in question is one he flips away from himself — his last ever cigarette — which happens to land on the thatch of an old man who has set up home in the bizarre almost-Australian landscape that Self has created.
According to the blurb, the novel is set in a realm that is half Australia, half Iraq. But you would be hard pushed to see the Iraq part (barring some extraneous insurgents). It is an Australia without the complex history, where tribes have established themselves as a government, forcing ‘Anglo’ lawbreakers to undergo bizarre rites of passage. The fact that these are invented is neither interesting to the reader or not interesting. There are, indeed, vast swathes of indifferece to get through.
Some reviewers have compared the journey undertaken by the protagonist, Tom Brodzinski, to the one in Heart of Darkness, but it is comparable only in the most superficial sense. The reader is never captured by the unheimlich atmosphere of darkest congo. The landscape is always sunbleached of any of its character. Self, it seems, is incapable of taking a reader on a journey and what might have been a diverting short story has been turned into an awful trudge of a novel.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Leave a Reply