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Spellbinding adventure story of a family that rejects its homeland and
tries to find a happier and simpler life in the jungles of Central
America. The motivation comes from the father, Allie Fox, who is a
character in the classic American mold. A cantankerous inventor, he is
articulate, shrewd, scornful, funny, very angry, and slightly cracked.
An individualist, Fox sees modern American culture as a despicable
combination of the wasteful, the immoral, and the messy. Uprooting his
family from their Massachusetts farm home, he takes them off to a
primitive world in order to escape what he considers the imminent
breakdown of civilization.
The Mosquito Coast
has the fascination of an ironic version of Robinson Crusoe or a
sardonic Swiss Family Robinson, along with the deeper levels akin to
those of The Lord of the Flies. As a sheer teller of tales Theroux is
at the top of his form, but he also succeeds as a moralist with a
subtle fable in mind.
The story is
told with fresh innocence by the fourteen year old Charlie, who
observes his father with a mixture of love, horror, and astonishment.
He describes the voyage, the trip into the interior, his father’s
invention of a giant ice-making machine (which is supposed to bring a
new era to the jungle), and all of the adventures that ensue. Charlie
watches as his father becomes ever more obsessive, evermore lost to
reality. |
