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Please go to Paul Theroux.com's new site, Paul TherouxFree Computer Help Forum Post-colonial
Malaysia is Theroux territory, charted fictionally in Saint Jack and
revisited in The Great Railway Bazaar. The Consul’s File is a journey
with a young American diplomat to a “bachelor post” at the uneasy
frontier where civilization meets jungle.
The Consul records his stint in Ayer
Hitam through a sequence of tales in which he is both observer and
participant. As his intimacy with the town grows, so does his motley
cast of Asians and exiles: the son of a Cantonese cafe owner, dreaming
of a Fuibright one day and a movie contract the next; Margaret
Harbottle, writer of travelogues and freeloader extraordinary; an
American ingenue dubbed “The Flower of Malaysia,” who flirts with
local mores and gets more than she bargained for.
Orphans of empire, the English and
Americans find refuge in their down-at-the-heels club -- the scene of
an epic tennis match between a Malay prodigy and a despised Japanese
salesman - - and diversion on the sexual battlefield. A dependent wife
goes on permanent liberty in Bali.
A woman anthropologist woos, and subdues, an aborigine chief. And the
Consul, on a Singapore rendezvous with a former lover, finds
diplomatic relations fatal to passion.
The supernatural flourishes like
exotic flora in Ayer Hitam, and its ghostly influence pervades many of
the Consul’s tales. From the comic to the bizarre, they build into a
sensual evocation of place and character. This is a master storyteller
writing at the height of his formidable power. |
