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Smoking gun 

Will Self finds naturalistic novels 'preposterous', preferring satire to 'make people think'. His latest book, The Butt, is a political allegory modelled on Heart of Darkness . . .

Some of his novel's ambiguities gather around the smoking bans that the Anglos are keen on, which are partly responsible for the central character's troubles with the law. Self, who's been cutting down himself, is "not particularly opposed to smoking bans. If the only flag of liberation you have to wave is a Silk Cut, it's a pretty feeble kind of revolution." But in the book, "as the crazed anthropologist says at the end, it's more a question of what these utilitarian conceptions of social morality imply about the way in which we think about our civilisation". Self relates this to the west's "tendency to pitch up in places, imposing its own morality and its own kind of civil ethic on something it doesn't even understand". Despite, or because of, the Kurtz-like anthropologist's activities, the "actual indigenous people" in the novel "remain as unknowable at the end as they were at the beginning".

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