Sylvia Brownrigg
THE COLLECTED STORIES by Paul Theroux (Penguin, R54,95)
Paul Theroux will go anywhere. He will willingly explore the blighted territory of a failing marriage; the tangled jungle of a mad poet’s secret anti-Semitism; the belated sexual guilt of a Hindu. In this great slab of his short fiction, Theroux is bolde r than in his travel writings. Fiction gives him what he clearly hungers for: the chance to travel incognito.
These are collected stories rather than selected ones – the volume comprises Theroux’s four earlier collections, and four unanthologised stories. Nearly all of these pieces were published before 1982.
This is a book of many and varied pleasures; to read it is to feel alert, curious, adventurous. The last 40-odd stories are narrated by an American consular officer, Spencer Savage, who endures two years of hardship in Malaysia before he is transferred t o the ultimate glamour post: London. Spencer, both bachelor and orphan, is a cool, rather faceless man whose bachelorhood is not permanent – the b ook ends with the optimistic monosyllables “I do.”
This seems a deliberate irony, however, in a collection whose pages weigh overwhelmingly against any faith in that promise. Theroux’s couples bicker, compete, and occasionally try to kill one another. “Married people argue about everything – anything” is a recurring theme, though this harsh cynicism has its poignant side, as in the piece about an American teacher in Singapore: “Len Rowley was a pr
ivate soul, and marriage had increased his loneliness by violating his reveries.”
Those who know Theroux’s work will be familiar both with his sharp ear for detail and with his vast, indulgent habit of generalisation. Theroux once wrote that “the expatriate who fails to be a person in any subtle sense can still, with a little effort, succeed as ‘a character'”; it is a weakness of this book that it contains more “characters” than it does people. Theroux is superb at nailing a ce rtain kind of ego, but you rarely know what lies behind these unpleasant or laughable souls.
Still, there aren’t many storytellers in whose company you can so comfortably remain for more than 600 pages.