SMOKING IS NOT ONLY an addictive pleasure; it has lately become a moral metaphor for self-indulgent, selfdestructive behaviour that is damaging not only personally to the smoker but to progressive national economies and to the Third World victimised by First World peddlers of tobacco. Smokers are regarded as the butt of their habit and, like Italo Svevo, are continually smoking their last, eternal cigarette.

When Tom Brodzinski, a middle-aged, middle-class American on vacation with his family in some typical tropical, Fauvist-coloured Third or Fourth World location, throws the butt of his last cigarette over the veranda of his holiday hotel, it strikes and blisters the head of Reginald Lincoln the Third, an elderly man married to a young native girl.

The injury is more serious than at first it appears: Lincoln, admitted to hospital, may die. His young wife demands not only retribution in line with local state laws but also, congruent with the customs of her local tribe, compensation. Even an accidental wrong must be righted, and so Tom falls into the hands of police, lawyers and diplomats.

The Gothic comedy of the novel, as a series of Tom's personal encounters and adventures, is largely picaresque. Self takes a ghoulish relish in Tom's malleability and misery. Passive and purely reactive, led by his nose and credit card through a farrago of rituals and conventions he barely understands but which define and direct his persecutors, Tom is the butt of the impenetrable manipulations and the capricious mercies of his tormentors. He might be likeable or unlikeable if we knew more about him, but Tom is little more than a cipher, a vehicle for dumb suffering, like a sacrificial ox.

In any case, his meaning in life seems to be, rather like any Evelyn Waugh “hero” you care to name, as a scapegoat for the sins of modern Western man. The eponymous butt is itself a cipher, a trigger, a McGuffin to kick-start the sequence of events and trials that Tom will undergo. The upshot, the end of all Tom's tiring and tedious exploring, is a lengthy peroration, a jeremiad, by a son-of-Kurtz character, a Bavarian anthropologist (“not an apologist”) who has lived long years in a heart of darkness with an indigenous tribe. Thereafter, in the butt-end of his life, Tom serves out an ironic, lifelong penance.

Self's novel is billed in the publisher's blurb as “an insidiously allegorical account of the Western liberal conscience in the aftermath of 9/11”: in which case the current “Western liberal conscience” has still some work to do, not simply in terms of guilty self-examination but of reasserting its sense of self-worth and self-definition.

Though I am on record as having found Simon Gray's first two Smoking Diaries resistible, I am grudgingly warming to the Gray persona; the quality and quantity of his old (though not yet golden) codger's indisposition towards the silly face of the human race suggests a consistency of character that is almost - though not always entirely - endearing. Here, Gray is again his own principal character. He talks and talks and talks and you can walk away for just long enough to smoke a cigarette and when you come back he's still talking and talking and really it doesn't matter a bit what he's saying because he's quite happy talking and talking to himself - which is like chain-smoking cigarettes, one after the other, until after a while you stop even tasting them and you just go on smoking because it's a lifelong habit and you only stop when you begin to feel sick.

So then you stop and you begin to wonder why you smoked so much without even thinking about it, which is rather like Gray on a monologist roll. He does talk to (and, of course, about) other people - notably Harold Pinter, also a good talker, alternately angry and cheerful, when the political and moral spirit moves him, who is suffering from cancer, and Antonia Fraser, Pinter's wife, who is given positive notices for being a great and good woman.

Gray also talks with his wife, Victoria, who lives somewhat in the middle distance and assumes (or is provided with) the persona of a competent nanny in charge of a would-be-wilful but complaisant adolescent boy.

Having discovered a successful literary formula, Gray picks up from the last full stop of volume two and moves seamlessly forward in his familiar associative, digressive, speculative, gossiping, fossicking, circumstantial mode. Writers, once upon a time, preferred to write structured topical essays, or compose elegant letters, when they wished to discuss matters personal and public. The preferred form now is the blog. Simon Gray is an accomplished serial blogger in three volume form. Three so far, that is - let us hope that the tumour lately discovered in his lung does not diminish the man or quieten his consequential, discursive voice.

The Butt by Will Self
Bloomsbury, £14.99; 368pp

The Last Cigarette: The Smoking Diaries Vol. 3 by Simon Gray
Granta, £14.99; 312pp

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist