Paul Theroux has never been afraid of covering the same subjects (Africa, himself) again and again and again, but his recent work has been openly engaged with ideas of repetition and return. For his last travel book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Theroux, then in his mid-sixties, took the same journey he had taken more than 30 years earlier for his first travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar. And when at the beginning of Ghost Train to the Eastern Star he listed among the developments that might have taken place “a good school turned into a ruin”, he had in mind an earlier encounter with a transformed landscape — the visit to Malawi described in another travel book, Dark Star Safari.
Theroux had lived in Malawi in the mid-1960s, during its last days as the Nyasaland Protectorate and its first days of independence. A US Peace Corps volunteer, eager both to avoid the Vietnam war and to find his way as a writer, he taught in a school, the Soche Hill Secondary School, outside Limbe. On returning there, almost 40 years later, he found that the place, the source of such optimism for the young Theroux, had been destroyed by theft and neglect.
The Lower River changes a few place names and turns the man making the return visit from a travel writer into a clothing retailer but otherwise the situation is that described in the Malawi section of Dark Star Safari. Ellis Hock was born in the same town as Theroux (Medford, Massachusetts) and spent his early twenties in Malawi at the same time and under the auspices of the same organisation. Southern Malawi remained in Hock’s mind “in the way that the notion of home might persist in someone else’s”. After breaking up with his wife and selling his store, he trades in Medford for Malabo, Mystic River for the Lower River.
Theroux fails to animate Hock’s sense of himself and of his environment, and to evoke the states (bliss, fear, exhaustion) he so often names, but the novel’s central problem is that its scenario ties realism about the present to romanticism about the past. The greater Hock’s disappointment with the new Malawi, the more acute his nostalgia. “The flourishing Lower River was gone,” Hock reflects, in Theroux’s slightly plodding third person. The school in which he taught looks like “the remains of an old civilisation”.
Theroux’s non-fiction has been no better at escaping such swings from adulation to despair, perfection to ruins. In Dark Star Safari, Theroux said the school’s library, now dark and empty, had once housed “10,000 books” and “a reference section with encyclopedias”. But in an article that he had written 40 years earlier (and presumably forgot about), he recalled that “what books we did have were an embarrassment” and that there was “nothing really suitable for Africans learning English”.
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When Malawi was still fresh in his mind, Theroux presented the school as struggling. But at a distance of 35 years (Dark Star Safari) and 45 years (The Lower River), it became something very special. The whole unhappy continent, as represented by this building, was on the fast track to literacy and harmony. The new novel is founded on the dynamic between the exceptionally good old days and the dreadfully bad new ones, with Africa being exoticised twice over — as the equal to a young man’s idealism, and as the equal to an old man’s fears about decline. Hock isn’t shown to be wrong about what Malawi once was, just wrong to believe that things would be the same.
“Had my long-ago itinerary changed as much as me?” Theroux wondered at the start of Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. It’s as if he doesn’t realise that the changes in himself render it impossible to calculate the changes in the places he visited. Theroux makes an attempt in the new book to acknowledge this complication, and to turn it into a rich ambiguity, when Hock reflects that he had known the Sena people “before they’d become artful” and then asks: “Or had they always been artful, and he too beguiled to see it?” But given that he is robbed, abused and kidnapped in the same place where he once lived without violent incident, there’s a limited degree to which Hock’s different experiences of Africa can be attributed to individual perspective, rather than to the composition of Theroux’s fictional world, with its stark contrasts and weakness for melodrama.
Hamish Hamilton £18.99/ebook £18.99 pp323, ST Bookshop price £14.99