Synopsis:
Tom Brodzinski is a man who takes his own good intentions for granted. But when he finally decides to give up smoking, a moment’s inattention to detail becomes his undoing. Flipping the butt of his final cigarette off the balcony of the holiday apartment he’s renting with his family, Tom is appalled when it lands on the head of one his fellow countrymen, Reggie Lincoln. The elderly Lincoln is badly burnt, and since the cigarette butt passed through public space before hitting him, the local authorities are obliged to regard Tom’s action as an assault, despite his benign intentions. Worse is to follow: Lincoln is married to a native from one of the rigorous, mystical tribes of the desert interior, and their customary law is incorporated into the civil statute.In order to make reparations to Mrs Lincoln’s people, Tom will have to leave his family behind, and carry the appropriate goods and chattels deep into the arid heart of this strange, island continent. Any of this might be bearable, were it not for Tom’s companion, forced on him by his enigmatic lawyer, the mixed-race Jethro Swai-Phillips.

Brian Prentice, like Tom, has to make reparations and although there is a taboo that prevents either man from knowing the exact detail of the other’s offence, Tom’s almost 100 per cent certain that he’s a child-abuser. As they drive into the desert and encounter a violent counter-insurgency war that Tom has allowed himself to remain in ignorance of, the relationship between the two men becomes one of complicit guilt as well as seething mistrust. Refusing facile moral certitudes, Will Self’s latest novel is set in a distorted world, in a country that is part Australia, part Iraq, part Greeneland and part the heart of a distinctively modern darkness.

Read a short report about it in Creative Review here.

“Alan Ayckbourn once wrote a play with 48 variant endings depending on whether a character chose to smoke a cigarette in the first scene. None of them is quite as preposterous as the fate that befalls Will Self’s hero, Tom Brodzinski, when he unthinkingly flips a stub over the balcony of his holiday home, causing mild burns to the man in the apartment below. A simple accident soon develops into a punitive sequence of compensation claims handled by extortionate lawyers and incompetent witch-doctors. The location is anyone’s guess – reference to dunnies and interior desert indicates Australia, though the insurgency going on suggests Afghanistan or Iraq. The invented anthropology is adeptly realised, though it also leads to passages of Self indulgence, such as lingering over arcane rituals whose significance is known only to the author. The satire comes with a Swiftian sense of indignation, though the continued harping about prohibition in public places suggests that the one thing that really irks him is anti-smoking legislation. Alfred Hickling.”

Here is the Observer’s review of the show, and a couple of bloggers’ too, here and here.