#THEROUX_Paul

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A Passage to India

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

(1910s English girl confused by experience of the Raj)

Between Two Worlds

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust  (Englishwoman contrasts modern India with her aunt"s 1920s experience)

James Clavell, Shogun  (American becomes samurai in 17th-century Japan)

John Le Carre, The Perfect Spy  ("autobiography" of ipper-echelon British spy - and double-agent, trying to discover where his loyalty lies)

Henry James, The Ambassadors  (rich 1900s Americans take "culture" to Europe, find it more civilised than they expected)

Confused Emotions

R.K. Narayan, The Vendor of Sweets  (devout Hindu in rural India dismayed by son"s "progressive" ways)

V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas  (Indian Hindu in Jamaica caught between dependence on his wife"s all-engulfing family and his longing to lead his own life)

L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between  (small boy in 1910s England carries love-messages, emotions he only dimly understands)

Paul Theroux, Fong and the Indians  (Indian shopkeeper struggling to survive in rural, tribal Africa)

Willa Cather, My Antonía  (daughter of 19th-century Bohemian immigrants growing up in rural Nebraska)

Imperialism, Good and Bad

Timothy Mo, An Insular Possession  (blockbusting novel about English imperialism in Honk Kong)

James Blish, A Case of Conscience  (should mineral-rich planet be exploited at expense of native inhabitants" life and culture?)

James Blish, A Case of Conscience  (should mineral-rich planet be exploited at expense of native inhabitants" life and culture?)

Rudyard Kipling, Kim  (adventures of Anglo-indian boy in heyday of Raj)

Twilight of Empire

Paul Scott, Staying On  (plight of English in India after independence)

Peter Vansittart, Three Six Seven  (Romanised Britons watching advance of barbarism after 4th century collapse of Roman power)

Morris West, The Ambassador  (Us ambassador in Vietnam, appalled by his country"s action there)

Gerald Seymour, Field of Blood  (underover SAS officer hunts IRA suspect in present-day Belfast)

P.H. Newby, The Picnic at Sakkara  (English teacher in 1950s Egypt confused by collapse of British Empire)

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Lord of the Flies

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

(choirboys lost on desert island revert to satanic evil, humanity's dark side)

Evil and Children (childish innocence an ideal vessel for evil - and sometimes, the children themselves are not so innocent)

Susan Hill, I"m the King of the Castle  (devil-child, jealous of rival, torments the life fronm him)

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw  (neurotic governess tries to protect two innocent charges against half-sensed, wholly evil ghosts)

Stephen King, Carrie  (bullied girl in junior high school uses Devil"s power to take revenge)

John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos  (alien race seeks to capture England by breeding race of hyper-intelligent, soulless children)

Surviving (shipwreck or desertion the door to new adventure)

James Vance Marshall, Walkabout  (English children marooned in Australian outback, taught survival by Aboriginal boy)

Tony Weeks-Pearson, Dodo

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe  (18th-century shipwrecked sailor builds new life on desert island)

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver"s Travels  (18th-century sailor tries to teach Europena "culture" in fantasy lands he visits)

Jim Crace, Signals of Distress

The Devil (takes many forms and can"t be resisted - or can he?)

Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

James Blish, Black Easter  (nuclear scientists enlists Devil"s help in bringing about Armageddon)

Fay Weldon, The Heart of England  (evil forces in Glastonbury countryside interfere with yuppie lives)

John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick  (bored Connecticut housewives play with witchcraft - and raise the Devil)

The Wilderness (surviving the most inhospitable areas of Earth)

Brian Moore, Black Robe  (17th-century Jesuit among 17th-century Indians: bloody, hopeless culture-clash)

C.S. Lewis, Perelandra  (battle for survival - and against unrelenting evil - on the empty planet Venus)

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness  (African jungle used as metaphor for the evil in humanity)

Patrick White, Voss  (half-crazy explorer leads doomed 19th-century expedition into heart of Australia)

Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast

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CONRAD, Joseph

Polish/British novelist (1857-1924)

Born in Poland, Conrad ran away to sea at 17 and ended up a captain in the merchant navy and a naturalised British subject. He retired from the sea at 37 and spent the rest of his life as a writer. There was at the time (1890s--1910s) a strong tradition of sea-stories, using the dangers and tensions of long voyages and the wonders of the worlds sailors visited as metaphors for human life. Most of this writing was straightforward adventure, with little subtlety; Conrad used its conventions for deeper literary ends. He was interested in driven' individuals, people whose psychology or circumstances force them to extreme behaviour, and the sea-story form exactly suited this idea. His books often begin as yarns', set in exotic locations and among the mixed (and mixed-up) human types who crew ocean-going ships. But before long psychology takes over, and the plot loses its straightforwardness and becomes an exploration of compulsion, obsession and neurosis.

HEART OF DARKNESS  (1902) This 120-page story begins as a yarn': Marlow, a sea-captain, tells of a journey he once made up the Congo river to bring down a stranded steamer. He became fascinated by stories of an ivory-merchant, a white man called Kurtz who lived deep in the jungle and was said to have supernatural powers. Marlow set out to find Kurtz, and the journey took him deeper and deeper into the heart not only of the Dark Continent', but into the darkness of the human soul. (Francis Ford Coppola's 1970s film Apocalypse Now updated this story to the Vietnam War, making points about US colonialism as savage as Conrad's denunciation of the ivory-trade).

Conrad's major novels are Lord Jim, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. His short-story collections (an excellent introduction to his work) are Tales of Unrest, Youth, Typhoon, A Set of Six, Twixt Land and Sea, Within the Tides and Tales of Hearsay.

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Typhoon (which deals with corruption and exploitation of a different kind, this time using as its metaphor a passenger steamer caught in a typhoon in the China Sea);

The Secret Agent (about the conflict between innocence and corruption among a group of terrorists in 1900s London)

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World is an sf novel of Conradian intensity. Lionel Davidson, Making Good Again Robert Edric, The Book of the Heathen a modern novelist examines Conradian themes in the Conradian setting of 1890s Belgian Congo). Graham Greene, The Comedians John Kruse, The Hour of the Lily Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Foretopman Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

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BURGESS, Anthony

British novelist and non-fiction writer (1917-1993)

Originally a composer, Burgess began writing books in his mid-30s, and poured out literary works of every kind, from introductions to Joyce (Here Comes Everybody/Re Joyce) to filmscripts, from opera libretti to book reviews. Above all he wrote several dozen novels, of a diversity few other 20th-century writers have ever equalled. They range from fictionalised biographies of Shakespeare (Nothing Like the Sun) and the early Christian missionaries (The Kingdom of the Wicked) to farce (the four Enderby stories, of which Inside Mr Enderby is the first and Enderby's Dark Lady is the funniest), from experimental novels (The Napoleon Symphony, about Napoleon, borrows its form from Beethoven's Eroica Symphony) to semi-autobiographical stories about expatriate Britons in the Far East (The Malaysian Trilogy). The literary demands of Burgess's books vary as widely as their contents: the way he finds a form and style to suit each new inspiration is one of the most brilliant features of his work.

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE  (1962) In a grim future Britain, society is divided into the haves, who live in security-screened mansions in leafy countryside, and the have nots, who swagger in gangs through the decaying cities, gorging themselves on violence. The book is narrated by the leader of one such gang, and is written in a private language, a mixture of standard English, cockney slang and Russian. (Burgess provides a glossary, but after a few pages the language is easy enough to follow, and its strangeness adds to the feeling of alienation which pervades the book.) The young man has committed a horrific crime, breaking into a house, beating up its owner and raping his wife, and the police are `rehabilitating' him. His true `crime', however, was not action but thought -- he aspired to a way of life, of culture, from which his class and lack of money should have barred him -- and Burgess leaves us wondering whether his `cure' will work, since he is not a brute beast (as the authorities claim) but rather the individuality in human beings which society has chosen to repress.

Burgess' other novels include a reflection on what he sees as the death-throes of modern Western civilisation, 1985, a gentler, Priestley-ish book about provincial English life earlier this century, The Pianoplayers, and A Dead Man in Deptford (an atmospheric novel about Christopher Marlowe - and Elizabethan theatre and espionage). Little Wilson and Big God and You've Had Your Time are autobiography, Mozart and the Wolf Gang is a 'celebration' for Mozart's bicentenary year, Urgent Copy and Homage to Qwert Yuiop are collections of reviews and literary articles and The Devil's Mode is a collection of short stories.

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Earthly Powers (a blockbuster embracing every kind of twentieth-century ‘evil’, from homosexual betrayal to genocide, and the Church’s reluctance or inability to stand aside from it)

To A Clockwork Orange : Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

To Burgess' historical novels : John Hersey, The Wall x Michelle Roberts, The Wild Girl Patricia Finney , Firedrake’s Eye

To The Malaysian Trilogy : Paul Theroux, Jungle Lovers

To the Enderby comedies : David Lodge, Small World Peter De Vries, Reuben, Reuben

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THEROUX, Paul

US novelist and non-fiction writer (born 1941)

Some of Theroux's most enjoyable books are about travelling: The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, The Kingdom by the Sea, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Happy Isles of Oceania, The Pillars of Hercules and Dark Star Safari. In all of them the narrator, the writer himself, feels detached, an observer of events rather than a participant - and the same is true of the people in Theroux's novels. They live abroad, often in the tropics; like the heroes of Graham Greene (the author Theroux most resembles) they feel uneasy both about the society they are in and about themselves; they fail to cope. The hero of Saint Jack (1973), a US pimp in Singapore, hopes to make a fortune providing rest and relaxation for his servicemen compatriots, but the pliability of his character makes him the prey for every con-man and shark in town. In The Mosquito Coast (1981) an ordinary US citizen, depressed by life, uproots his family and tries to make a new start in the Honduran jungle, with tragic, farcical results. Picture Palace (1978) is the life-story of a famous photographer who has hidden all her life behind her camera, reduced existence to images on film, and now, in withered old age, agonisingly contrasts her memories of youth, warmth and affection with the dusty prints which are all she has to show for them.Honolulu Hotel (2001) is an episodic novel set in a rundown hotel in Hawaii. The manager is an unsuccessful writer, battling with the personal demons that beset so many of Theroux’s charac- ters, who acts as witness to the tragi-comedies and mini-dramas that unfold in the seedy rooms of the hotel.

MY SECRET HISTORY  (1989) André Parent is an American writer, born at the time of the second world war, randy for women and hot for every experience the world can offer. He teaches in Africa, writes novels and stories, makes a fortune from a travel book. He fulfils his adolescent ambition, to fuck the world', only to find that he has lost moral identity. The book is wry, funny, and no comfort to Americans, intellectuals, writers, the middle-aged, or indeed anyone else at all.

Theroux’s other novels include Waldo, The Family Arsenal, Doctor Slaughter, Chicago Loop, Millroy the Magician, an acid science fiction fantasy O-Zone, My Other Life (a kind of companion to My Secret History), Kowloon Tong, The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro and Blinding Light. Sinning With Annie, The Consul’s File and The London Embassy are collections of short stories. Fresh Air Fiends is a collection of travel essays; Sir Vidia’s Shadow is a memoir of Theroux’s 30-year friendship (now ended) with V.S. Naipaul, horribly compelling in its revelations of the insecurities and jealousies of the literary life.

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To My Secret History : John Fowles, Daniel Martin Graham Greene, The Honorary Consul

To Theroux's novels in general : William Boyd, Stars and Bars Timothy Mo, Sour-Sweet P.H. Newby, Leaning in the Wind

To the travel books : Jonathan Raban, Coasting Colin Thubron, Behind the Wall V.S. Naipaul, Among the Believers

To O-Zone : Robie Macauley, A Secret History of Time to Come

To the short stories : Lawrence Durrell, Antrobus Complete

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MAUGHAM, W. Somerset

British writer of novels, short stories and plays (1874-1965)

A tireless traveller (especially in the Far East), Maugham wrote hundreds of short stories based on anecdotes he heard or scenes he observed en route. Many of them were later filmed: Rain', for example (about a missionary on a cruise-liner in Samoa struggling to reform a prostitute, and losing his own soul in the process), was made half a dozen times. Maugham's novels used true experience in a similar way, shaping it and drawing out its meaning but keeping close to real events. Liza of Lambeth (1897) is about a Londonslum girl tormented by her neighbours for conceiving a bastard child. Of Human Bondage (1915) is the story of an orphan, bullied at school because he has a club foot, who struggles to find happiness as an adult, is ravaged by love for a worthless woman, and settles at last to become a country doctor. The stockbroker hero of The Moon and Sixpence (1919) gives up career, wife and family to become a painter in the South Seas, as Gauguin did. Cakes and Ale (1930) is an acid satire about the 1930s London literary world; Maugham avoided libel suits only by claiming that every writer it pilloried was just another aspect of himself.

Maugham's other novels include The Trembling of a Leaf, The Casuarina Tree, The Razor's Edge and Catalina. His Complete Short Stories and Collected Plays (from 1907--32 he wrote two dozen successful plays, mainly comedies) were published in the 1950s. A Writer's Notebook and The Summing Up give fascinating insights into the balance between his life and work.

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To Liza of Lambeth : Emile Zola, The Boozer (L'Assommoir) Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago

To Of Human Bondage : C.P. Snow, Strangers and Brothers Jerome Weidman, Fourth Street East

To The Moon and Sixpence : Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth

To Cakes and Ale : Rose Macaulay, Crewe Train J.B. Priestley, The Image Men

To the short stories : Guy de Maupassant, Boule de Suif Rudyard Kipling, Wee Willie Winkie R.L. Stevenson, Island Nights' Entertainment Paul Theroux, World's End

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Travel

Travel writing has a long history. Some 2500 years ago, Herodotus travelled widely in the Middle East and Egypt, researching his History of the Persian War -- and wrote up the unexpected peoples and customs he encountered. Six centuries later, Pausanias walked every kilometre of Greece, recording local legends and customs in a guide-book which, incredibly, can still be used today. Eleven hundreds years later still, the Venetian Marco Polo produced, in Travels (1298), one of the first travel best-sellers, a wide-eyed account of the wonders of medieval Asia -- and travel writing has flourished ever since. For the reader, it has a double attraction: he hear exotic places and people, and the writer takes all the strain. Nowadays, when so much of the world is documented, it is often this last feature, the personal spin each author puts on familiar experience, which gives a book life: personal grouchiness, comedy, fine descriptive prose, interesting reflections,or (in the best books of all), all four.

Mark Abley, Beyond Forget (1988). Forget is a four-street village in the Canadian prairies, and Abley recounts his surreal adventures as he drives there across the 'Big Lonely' -- as hoboes used to call the area.

Bill Bryson, Made in America (1993). Hilarious musings on everything Americanm from popcorn to gridlock, pegged loosely to a narrative of perfectly ordinary tourist travel -- except than nothing, in Bryson's eyes, is ever ordinary.

Richard Burton, A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Mecca (1855). Burton, disguised as an Arab, was the first European to visit the holy places of Islam, and tells the tale as if he were writing an adventure novel.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World (1922). Classic account, using letters, diaries amd the author's own Polar experience, of Captain Scott's doomed explorations in the 1910s.

Gerald Durrell, The Bafut Beagles (1953). Funny account of animal-collecting in Africa. Also Three Singles to Adventure, A Zoo in My Luggage, The Whispering Land.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts (1977). Eighteen-year-old rebel in 1933 sets out to travel from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul -- on foot. Classic of the genre.

Thor Heyerdahl, The Kon-Tiki Expedition (1948). Across the Pacific on a huge balsa-wood raft, to show that Polynesians may have been settlers from ancient South America.

Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa (1897). Unflappable Victorian lady walks and rides through jungles, crosses rivers, clims mountains, camps near hostile villages -- and savours every moment.

Merriwether Lewis, The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1964). Account (by those who did it) of the first East-West crossing by white men of North America.

Geoffrey Moorhouse, Om (1993). Well-known travel-writer tours South India, looking for enlightenment. Fascinating places and people -- and a thoughtful account of the author's spiritual journey.

V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (1964). West Indian writer spends a year in India, writes dazzling, caustic account.

Eric Newby, A Short-Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958). Author and laconic friend go for walk in the Himalayas, in true Boy's-Own-Paper style. Very funny.

John Preston, Touching the Moon (1990). Obsessed since the age of 13 with Rider Haggard's She, the adult Preston sets out to find her legendary kingdom, in the Mountains of the Moon which border Uganda and Zaire. The reality is sore feet, lice-infested hotels, conmen and eating reconstituted curry in the rain. Hilarious.

Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768). -- by the author of Tristram Shandy.

Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express (1979). Splendidly grumbly novelist specialises in horrendous train journeys. This one takes him from Boston, Massachussets, all the way to Patagonia and back. A modern classic.

Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands (1969). Across the Sahara with the Bedouin. One of the great contemporary travel books.

Colin Thubron, Behind the Wall (1987). Modern China, its landscape, its people and its uneasy links with a glorious past.

Also recommended:   Douglas Botting, One Chilly Siberian Morning    Heinrich Harrer, Seven Years in Tibet    Peter Hopkirk, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road    Alan Moorhead, Cooper's Creek    James Morris, The Great Port    Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India on a Bicycle    Gilbert Ronay, The Tartar Khan's Englishman    Mary Russell, The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt    Freya Stark, Riding to the Tigris    John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley   

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An Unofficial Rose

Iris Murdoch, An Unofficial Rose

(nine people, all looking for love; nine intertwined, entangled lives)

Lure of the Exotic

Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast  (tired of US civilisation, man takes family "back to nature" in Ecuadorian jungle)

Olivia Manning, The Rain Forest  (young couple, psychically "lost", seek solace on magical, sinister tropical island)

Patrick White, Voss  (explorers "find" themselves by trekking across Australia; at home in Sydney, girl waits breathlessly for news)

Angus Wilson, The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot  (widow seeks happiness by surrendering to impulse, going on haphazard Far Eastern odyssey)

Rosamond Lehmann, A Sea-Grape Tree  (deserted wife seeks spiritual and psychic reassurance on Caribbean island)

Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits  (Trueba family women, over four generations, order their lives by magic, fantasy and psychic communion rather than as their patriarch ordains)

Searching for Self

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse  (thoughts and memories of large close family on holiday: projected day-trip to a lighthouse focuses each of their lives)

Lisa St Aubin de Terán, The Bay of Silence  (apparently happy, successful film actress haunted by schizophrenia)

Christopher Isherwood, A Meeting By the River  (two brothers, extranged and "lost", find Buddhism, true love and tranquility of soul)

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf  (lonely middle-aged recluse "rehabilitated" spiritually by three mystical, possibly fantasy young people)

Lawrence Durrell, The Dark Labyrinth/Cefalù  (group of tourists enter Cretan labyrinth in search of psychic identity - and each quest is unexpectedly fulfilled)

Eleanor Dark, Return to Coolami  (four people motoring in Australian outback discover themselves)

Women Alone

Jenny Diski, Rainforest  (professor tries to stop intellectual meticuluosness destroying emotional life)

Anita Brookner, A Misalliance  (divorced woman, keeping up facade of busy, fulfilled existence, is troubled by chaotic emotional life of people she meets)

Bernice Rubens, Our Father  (archeologist"s meeting with God in Sahara triggers a search of her past and the relationship between her charismatic, enigmatic parents)

Susan Hill, In the Springtime of the Year  (young widow "rehabilitated" from grief by calm rhythms of country life)

Jane Gardam, Crusoe"s Daughter  (Robinson Crusoe gives lonely woman purpose in life and grasp on sanity)

D.M. Thomas, The White Hotel  (case-history of disturbed woman, erotic and violent, reflects nightmarish psychic experience of all 20th-century humanity)

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1984

George Orwell, 1984

(repression and oppression in grim totalitarian future)

Bleak Prospects (nightmare scenarios for the future of human society)

Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves  ("civilised" woman in distress, rehabilitated by contact with aboriginal "primitive" people)

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid"s Tale  (grim future: totalitarian, religious oppression, anti-women)

George Turner, The Sea and Summer

Paul Theroux, O-Zone  (efforts to make a viable post-nuclear society in US wilderness)

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange  (crime and class-war in future Britain)

Inner Hell (the nightmare is inside us)

Will Self, My Idea of Fun

William Golding, Lord of the Flies  (choirboys lost on desert island revert to satanic evil, humanity"s dark side)

Georges Simenon, The Murderer  (criminal psychologically destroyed by guilt)

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness  (wilderness as a satanic, engulfing force, human evil symbolised)

Fay Weldon, Life and Loves of a She-Devil  (betrayed wife takes macabre, comic revenge)

The Ghastly Past (totalitarian, fundamentalist nightmares from "real" history)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter  (religious bigotry in Pilgrim Fathers America)

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop  (Catholic missionaries test their faith in 1870s Mexican wilderness)

Graham Greene, Brighton Rock  (crime and redemption in 1930s England)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich  (repression of dissidents in Stalinist labour-camp)

Maxim Gorky, Foma Gordeev  (underbelly of Tsarist Russia in decline)

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The Wilderness

Andrea Barrett, The Voyage of the Narwhal

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Eleanor Dark, The Timeless Land

James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans

Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

Brian Moore, Black Robe

Jane Rogers, Promised Lands

Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast

Patrick White, Voss