The Lower River [Hardcover]

Most of Theroux's more recent works tend to feature a version of the author himself as protagonist: a slightly knackered traveller who visits faraway places that once were joyous and pristine, and have now turned sour. The hero meets wicked people who exploit him as a meal ticket, and is often tempted by exotic young maidens who provide diversion and optimism. The Lower River fully conforms to this pattern, and is the masterpiece of a series that includes great works such as Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific and further back, The Mosquito Coast. Buy and read this book, because it is one of Theroux's best.

A former Peace Corps volunteer, disappointed with the breakdown of his family life and saddened by the decay of a nondescript inner city in America, returns to the Africa of his hopeful and distant youth. Looking to revisit a time in his life when his contribution to a tiny village had meant something, he finds his way back to the remote outpost but soon finds that time has moved on. Instead of being valued for his contribution, a more cynical attitude now prevails among the locals, and our hero soon finds himself struggling to survive, let alone rediscover his self-worth. The author is masterful in building an atmosphere of brooding menace, of wrongful sex, and bacterial materialism at the most simple level of civilisation. The writing is first-rate, the plot is a page-turner, and the local insights and observations are convincingly original and unique.

I don't know whether Theroux's version of Malawi / Mocambique is accurate. I don't care to be honest. I was just caught up in this deliciously nightmarish story and couldn't put this one down.

A novel from Paul Theroux is always welcome and I'm pleased to say that The Lower River is well up to his usual high standard.

As the book opens, we find Ellis Hock with his marriage falling apart and the store reaching the end of its economic life. The marriage break-up is painful, and is not helped by his grasping daughter who wants some of her inheritance long before Ellis is ready to die. Malawi had held a place in Ellis's heart all through his years of tailoring and he decides to have done with his wife, daughter and shop and to return to Africa, to visit Malabo, the village he worked in while in the Peace Corps so many years before.

Nearly forty years has passed since Ellis was last in Africa. The cities have been transformed from slow-moving communities with dirt roads and shabby buildings into modern townscapes with a preponderance of Mercedes cars, cell-phones and upmarket nightclubs.

He visits the American consul and manages to arrange transport to Malabo, taking a minimum of possessions apart from several bundles of dollars, but leaving his cell-phone behind. After a long and arduous journey he reaches the village and makes contact with the head-man Festus Manyenga, a young man in his twenties who addresses Ellis as father and treats him as an honoured guest.

As Ellis gets to know the village he occasionally meets people who knew him when they were children, although they are now old men and women, showing the result of non-existent health care and a life of toil. He visits the school he had helped build and had taught in all those years ago but it apparently decayed long ago: "head-high bushes had grown up around the building. The roof of the classrooms was mostly gone, only brittle pieces remaining. Weeds grew in the eaves. All the furniture had been removed. The table at his hut had been one of these. The windows were broken. The office was just a shell, though it showed signs that it had been lived in, mats and quilts twisted on the floor, scorch marks on the walls . . . Hock studied the ruin and tried to imagine how to put it back together"

In his minds eye he imagined the school rebuilt and himself "standing on the veranda, as the minister had stood long ago, leading the students in the national anthem and giving them a pep talk".

He decides to stay on the village and is allocated his own hut and a 16 year old girl, Zizi, to act as his house-keeper and assistant. The community treat him with great respect but he has to deal with many requests for money which he responds to with gifts from his stash of dollars.

Theroux is a master of narrative and slowly we realise that Hock has actually placed himself into a very dangerous situation. The village has regressed during the years he was away from it and it presents a primitive world of tribal beliefs and customs which are extremely antagonistic to western visitors.

The book develops tremendous pace as the weeks unfold and the reader is drawn into a horrific account of Hock's life in this dark corner on the borders of Malawi and Mozambique which he discovers is almost a no-man's-land where aid agencies keep their distance and government seldom intrudes.

I enjoyed reading this book. In some ways it feels like Paul Theroux's version of Conrad's Heart of Darkness (Penguin Classics), containing little cause for optimism about the remoter reaches of the African continent where AIDs and unending poverty hold the people in a state of poverty of mind, body and spirit. There is hope in the book, as seen in the strength of Ellis's housekeeper Zizzi, who finds a sort of redemption from the dreadful circumstances of her life through Hock's visit. This is a quality read from a highly-regarded writer and is has no difficulty in getting my five stars.

Ellis Hock is at a crossroads in his life. His marriage has broken down, his daughter is not speaking to him, his business has been sold and many empty years of retirement is looming on the horizon. So he decides to go back to the only place he remembers being truly happy - A small village called Malabo on the Lower River in Malawi, where he taught English while he was in the Peace Corps. Where he fell in love, spent many happy hours in blissful occupation, and lived entirely at peace with his surroundings. Over 40 years ago.

But the homecoming Hock has been anticipating (with some apprehension) is not as glorious as he hoped it might be. The Africa he left behind, a country of community, friendliness, naivety, gratitude and culture has been through a violent change. Capitalism, drought, poverty and disease has changed Malabo into a darker place - And Hock finds the tables have turned in the relationship between the villagers and the rich mzungu; White Man.

Theroux has produced an African setting which is pulsating with white heat, dust and dying vegetation. It is vivid and perfectly pitched, you can almost feel the 'corrosive sun' which beats down on Malabo. The narration is hypnotic, slow, as if sedated by the African heat, always intensely atmospheric. There is a tension in the story which feels like an unnamed menace or dark shadow hidden just beyond view, and it compels the reader to turn the pages. You can't help but get drawn in.

It's not all good though - I found Hock's gloomy defeatism frustrating after a while, his pensive self-pity getting in the way of him helping himself too many times. I also didn't like the blanket negativity Theroux has applied to the local Africans, painting them all as mercenary, angry, evil and callous, devoid of any independent thought or moral compass. I appreciate that he might be trying to make a point - That the explosive development in the Western world has come at a high cost for the vulnerable parts of the planet, but I found his exaggeration lacks the subtlety to give his message real power.