Will Self: The Butt

If you haven't gathered by now, I'm not real adept at writing reviews. I try hard, but I end up repeating words like, "neat" and "good" and "interesting" eighteen times in the span of two paragraphs, which is neither neat, good, nor interesting.

Nonetheless, let me try again.

Will Self's books contain some of the most complicated prose I have ever tried to read. It may be cultural (English versus American), it could be that the stories are so creative that it just takes my brain a while to wrap around them, or I could just be a little dim. But at the end of every novel, I feel like I've been put through the works to earn a good story. And for books like The Quantity Theory of Insanity and My Idea of Fun, I was never disappointed with the effort I needed to extend to read a great story.

The Butt was actually a much easier read with, albeit a complicated story, a fairly simple premise: ignorant tourist in foreign country inadvertently commits a crime against a local tribe...wackiness ensues. Not Animaniacs wackiness, but the "yer stuck in our country now, rich boy" kind that we all probably secretly fear when traveling abroad (or, you know, south of the Mason-Dixon line if you happen to be from the North in the US). The cleverest thing about the story is that nobody is assigned a nationality; it can be implied that the lead character (ignorant tourist) is American...or English, and that the locality is Middle Eastern...Austrailan...Central American...see, that is just it: Self's scheme is to make us build the characters we want them to be and put them in the place we least want to have a conflict. Hell, I never even thought the setting was the Middle East until I read a number of reviews (after reading the novel)...and actually, I still don't...but some folks do, which I guess is the real trick.

Not unlike Self's Dorian, which was a modern-day take of The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Butt does have a loose resemblance to Heart of Darkness, and ultimately the journey of our lead character becomes the anticipation of confrontation with the novel's own Kurtz. Self's reputation for the bizarre actually makes the conflict slightly anticlimactic, but it is still stranger than the average bear.

It is a fun read; fairly quick, somewhat miserable, and a peculiar commentary on current world relations without prejudice or bias.