Fiction: Restlessness has always been the sustaining life force of Paul Theroux's vicious, sophisticated fictions. He is the cool, detached observer still best known as the author of enduring travel classics, yet at its best his fiction stands somewhere between Greene and Maugham with hints of Patrick White.
Theroux is the one major US writer who has remained closer to the colonial; his America looks to Europe and roams Africa and Asia. He is everywhere and nowhere and increasingly caught in personal memory and snappy social commentary.
Blinding Light quickly settles in the particular quasi-confessional world of My Secret History (1989) and My Other Life (1996). Unnerving and at times stingingly funny as only Theroux can be, its intention is to leave the reader guessing how much is true, how much is invented. If he remains best known for The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) and The Old Patagonian Express (1978), he is an able and surprisingly underestimated novelist. He specialises in keeping everyone, including his central characters and narrators, as well as the reader, squirming. He likes deception and trickery but enjoys dealing in hard, sordid truths about sexuality.
Cold, selfish Slade Steadman is a writer made rich and famous and eternally miserable by the legendary success of his first, and to date, only book, Trespassing, a cult travel yarn, that inspired non-reading readers as well as a massive spin-off merchandising industry.
A desperate need to write again has partly influenced what he had planned as an anthropological trip to Ecuador intended to establish him "as a traveller in search of enlightenment". The other motivation is to orchestrate a ceremonial mutual ending to his offbeat, formerly highly sexualised now indifferent, relationship with Ava, a doctor who appears to be as tough and impersonal as he is, and shares his abiding obsession with sex as an art form rather than as an expression of emotion.
Together, though determinedly travelling as free agents, they reluctantly encounter other seekers they had not been expecting. "What he had hoped would be an adventure seemed no more than a school tour." Their companions consist of two crass couples who are habitual adventure holiday-makers and a bizarre, somewhat desperate German who appears to be writing something and has more than a passing knowledge of jungle plants and associated drugs.
The early sequences of the narrative are heavy with the presence of J. G. Ballard. The cosumerist characters are cartoon figures, desperate for thrills. Endless gags are wrung from the mobile phone dependency of people who have nothing to say yet need to talk. The satire is slick and merciless. The bickering group are led into the jungle, all the while exchanging nasty put downs. Ava proves to have a flair for savage abuse. Steadman, proud of her rudeness, reveals little about himself, just notes that the appalling couples favour wardrobes based on Trespassing spin-off travel wear. One of the women is even reading a copy of his book.
The observations are sharp and the long opening sequence is a satirical study of nasty humans at play, freely jeering the primitive native society they have invaded.
The real action begins with some of the party, most specifically Steadman, sampling the weird drug potions concocted by a witch doctor. It is here he acquires the blindness that will give him vision. During his spells of sightlessness, he believes his mind achieves heightened clarity.
This may sound lofty but it is heavily interspersed with the resumption of coolly experimental sex with Ava, who consistently talks about being a doctor yet insults all comers and is preoccupied with sex as escape. Theroux makes no attempt to conceal Steadman's two reasons for existing, his fame as a writer and his sense of sexual expression. Yet Theroux can also be very funny, as was seen in his engaging romp Hotel Honolulu (2001), in which the narrator, another writer, takes to dropping out of the literary life and becomes a hotel manager in Hawaii.
The sex in Blinding Light often approaches the pornographic in its explicitness. There is no romance. Steadman ponders the memory of his brief marriage and admits he can't remember his wife's face, only her body. His responses to women are entirely sexual. But then the women he has met along the way are also driven by sex.
It sounds shocking, and it is. This is black comedy at its blackest and Theroux is not concerned about wooing his reader. His fiction has often reflected the twists and turns and several lives lived by characters who are never particularly likeable.
When Steadman returns from the trip, now presenting himself as a blind man, he has become sufficiently interesting again, at least sexually, for Ava to decide to take leave from the hospital and help him write his new novel, The Book of Revelation. When not engaged in writing the book, the pair do what they do best - engage in impersonal sex.
Ava shifts between moral conscience and degenerate playmate as Steadman's celebrity status is enhanced by having lost his sight.
The small circle he moves within at Martha's Vineyard also includes the then president Bill Clinton, for all of this takes place during that administration. Subplots and references include the Lewinsky scandal and the death of Princess Diana. It is all only a backdrop for Steadman's story, part fantasy, part polemic, which develops into a modern-day variation of the Faust legend.
Blindness gives him vision. Or at least the drug, Datura, does, "blindfolding him, giving him sight". Slowly but surely, Steadman is taught a lesson. In the course of writing his new novel, he reveals his personality through a serious of memories, most of which revolve upon sex and sexuality.
There are moments of exasperated comedy such as when Steadman remembers the struggle to publish that first, life-shaping book and the acknowledgments he had fantasised about adding: "To my ex-wife, Charlotte, who was too busy to finish reading this book in draft, eat me! . . . to my editor who seldom returned my phone calls . . . to all the people who told me not to go on my journey, or said they could not see the point of this book, or belittled the title, or said the text was too long . . ."
It all sounds a bit daft but Theroux succeeds because his portrait of his immensely unpleasant central character convinces. The narrative becomes a fable of not quite everyday folk preoccupied by not quite everyday obsessions and presents human nature at its most sleazy. It is a queasily authentic account of the ego and uncertainty and deception that drives a writer.
Menace and self indulgence underpin the book as does truth. Shrewd, assured Theroux is simply a very good writer regardless of what he is writing about; he uses language effectively. In common with John Banville, his art lies in the sure-footedness of the prose and the relentless intelligence, and both are acidly witty. It is also interesting to note that while Joyce Carol Oates is considered a hyperactive writer with whom no reader possibly can keep up, and many have also chastised the great John Updike for writing too much. Theroux the maverick East Coast patrician unafraid of the unpleasant, has also produced a large body of work without being censured for doing so. The elegant brutality he brings to his dissections of human nature, his own and others, is informed and invariably, compulsively readable.
Steadman having completed his belated second book, realises that his greatest hatreds are reserved for himself. "He had never been more-clear-sighted than when, drugged, he had blinded himself". There is no sympathy, only truth. That Steadman would call his novel, The Book of Revelation, is an apt decision. For all the secrecy and intrigue, Theroux's work has always been rife with revelations.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Blinding Light By Paul Theroux Hamish Hamilton. 438pp. £17.99
