Now available in paperback

Tom Brodzinski, the protagonist or victim of Will Self’s satirical nightmare The Butt, meets a comparable fate. On holiday on an imaginary post-colonial island continent, Tom decides to give up smoking, and, distracted by the sense that for once he is ‘Doing the Right Thing’, flicks his final fag-end from the balcony of his hotel. The smouldering butt lands on another guest’s head, and Tom is swallowed by a maelstrom: the country’s draconian anti-smoking legislation regards a cigarette as ‘a projectile weapon with a toxic payload’, and the civil law turns out to incorporate a set of native customary laws which hold that every gesture ipso facto indicates an intent. He must travel thousands of miles into the continent’s tribal lands to make restitution for attempted murder. His wife and children whisk away on the flight home, and, queasily, he stays behind to get to grips with the racial complexities and cultural opacities of the invented land. It is a version of Australia laced with suggestions of post-invasion Iraq, where the ‘Anglo’ descendants of the former colonial power coexist with innumerable aboriginal ethnicities and tribal groupings: Tayswengo, Tugganarong, Inssessetti, Entreati, Gandaro, Ibbolit. These unfamiliar words press in on Tom like the ‘soupy’ heat. On the tourist circuit it was easy to ignore the proximity of the wild, but now ‘even here, on the coast, Tom sensed this alien landscape to his rear, an apprehension of a door ajar in reality itself, through which might be glanced seething horrors.’

(LRB 19 June 2008)

Bloomsbury | hardback 355 pp. |ISBN: 9780747591757