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Product Description
Spencer Savage, a young American consul, is posted to Ayer Hitam, a small Malaysian town, in the 1970s. Told to close down this remote outpost in the sweltering jungle, he instead finds himself drawn to the many characters he meets among the Malays, Indians, Japanese, Chinese, and the clubbable expat Brits.
Through his eyes we see the rich tapestry of multi-ethnic life in post-colonial Malaysia, from adultery to murder, from ghost stories to the murky waters of diplomatic politics.
It is a brilliant portrait of a vanished time, a lost landscape and scattered peoples.
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Customer Reviews
The stories are all witty and imaginative and this book should be required reading for all those who are planning to visit or be posted there. And anybody who has been to Malaysia or has worked as a consul in the tropics can relate to them with much mirth and pleasure! Very strongly recommended!
I know of Theroux through his wonderfully minimal little horror tale The Black House; seems most people know him for travel writing. This is something of which I was previously unaware, but I became well acquinted with it while reading this book, a loose collection of stories about the life of an American consul sent to Ayer Hitam (in Malaysia) to close down the consulate there. (As a side note, Ayer Hitam is now a forest preserve maintained by the University Putra Malaysia, and dropping by UPM's website to take the photo tour lends a whole other perspective into reading this book.)
Theroux's hapless protagonist spends his time cataloguing the odd folks to be found in and passing through Ayer Hitam, and Theroux's strength lies mostly in characterization. The population of Ayer Hitam (equal parts indigenous, Tamil, and Chinese, with a smattering of British expatriates) is the stories' real focus, and a number of them come to life in the stories dedicated to them. Not terribly much actually goes on there, but these aren't plot-driven stories anyway.
Good stuff if you like character portraits, but if you're looking for more of a plot, other Theroux works might be a better jumping-off point. ***
Theroux, perhaps best known for "The Mosquito Coast" and a host of wonderful travel journals, displays in these early stories a sincere voice, non-judgmental and full of wonder at seeing the new and exotic. "The Consul's File" is short and insightful. Worthwhile.
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