BACK in 1998 I was living in a low-rent London bedsit, reading Will Self’s Great Apes and spending my days imagining the city’s denizens as the flea-bitten hominids Self’s prose
so wonderously described. It was grand fun. I felt in on the joke; superior and arrogant like Will himself.
Ten years on, I’m reading him again, this time his new novel, The Butt, which is set in a post-colonial south seas land, not unlike Australia, with a touch of Africa and New Zealand thrown in. But far from being in on the joke, I feel (if you’ll excuse the pun) the butt of it.
The novel follows the mis-adventures of Tom, who is on holiday with his family in the exotic and afore-mentioned land. Standing on the balcony of his hotel room smoking a cigarette, Tom absent-mindedly flicks away his butt, which lands on the head of an infirm old man below, starting a chain of events that has Tom charged with attempted murder. The old man
being married to a native girl, Tom is tried under native law, and travels to the interior to make reparations to the tribe, in order to avoid more severe penalties.
The novel charts some dangerous territory, mocking indigenous culture almost as thoroughly as it does post-colonial culture, equating, in the process, a liberal mindset with a radical
lobotomy. It takes potshots at anti-smoking laws, has gun-toting redneck Australian moa-hunters that wear giant baby stretch’n’grows, and has violence and murder sponsored by greedy insurance firms. All of which whirls around Tom, the hapless everyman bewildered by the intoxicating mix of old and new and unable to navigate the confusing landscape of
multiculturalism.
If you’re wondering, then yes, it is as offensive as it sounds. But taking offence is all too easy, the kind of knee-jerk guilt-inspired liberalism of which Self is making fun. The only thing
worse than being offended, really, would be to take it all at face value. I get the feeling the whole thing is a challenge. If you’re offended, you lose. If you’re not offended, you’re an ass. I can almost hear Self smirking from here.
People often refer to Self’s beautiful prose, and he again delivers an amazing book. I just didn’t like it much. It’s as if someone is playing an extraordinarily complicated, but perfectly executed, piece of music that just so happens to bring on acute nausea. You can appreciate its brilliance, but you can’t bear to be in the same room with it for long.