The Butt was published by Bloomsbury in 2008. Tom Brodzinski, a middle-aged Englishman on holiday in an unnamed country that resembles both Australia and various Middle Eastern states, gives up smoking. As he extinguishes his last cigarette by flicking it from a hotel balcony, the butt lands on the neck of an elderly indigenous man sitting below. In this country — whose legal system hybridizes Western law, indigenous customary law, and colonial-era statutes in impenetrable layers — this constitutes an assault requiring elaborate restitution.
Tom must travel deep into the country’s interior to deliver compensation to the old man’s extended tribal family. The journey becomes a picaresque through landscapes of postcolonial absurdity: each region has its own legal customs, its own interpretation of Tom’s offense, its own demands. Bureaucrats proliferate, intermediaries multiply, the simple act of apology becomes an administrative and cultural labyrinth.
Self’s satire operates on multiple levels. Tom is the well-meaning liberal Westerner whose good intentions are irrelevant to the structural violence his culture has inflicted. The unnamed country is a composite of every place the British Empire touched, its legal and cultural contradictions the direct product of colonial administration. The cigarette butt is the smallest possible offense — trivial, accidental — and the cascading consequences expose the absurdity of systems built on accumulated historical injustice.
Collecting The Butt
First edition (Bloomsbury, London, 2008): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Very good: $8–$20