The Lower River: A Riveting Literary Thriller – Peace Corps Dream Becomes African Nightmare of Survival

by Paul Theroux

“[Hock] knows he is ensorcelled by exoticism, but he can’t help himself. And, as things go from bad to worse and the pages start to turn faster, neither can we. A.”—Entertainment Weekly When he was a young man, Ellis Hock spent four of the best years of his life with the Peace Corps in Malawi. So when his wife of forty-two years leaves him, he decides to return to the village where he was stationed in search of the happiness he’d been missing since he left. But what he finds is not what he expected. The school he built is a ruin, the church and clinic are gone, and poverty and apathy have set in among the people. They remember Ellis and welcome him with open arms. Soon, however, their overtures turn menacing; they demand money and refuse to let him leave the village. Is his new life an escape or a trap? “Theroux’s bravely unsentimental novel about a region where he began his own grand career should become part of anybody’s education in the continent.”—Washington Post “The Lower River is riveting in its storytelling and provocative in its depiction of this African backwater, infusing both with undertones of slavery and cannibalism, savagery and disease.”—New York Times Book Review

Genres: Fiction, Africa, Travel, Malawi, Novels, Adventure, Literature

340 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 22, 2012

About the author

Paul Edward Theroux is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work is The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), a travelogue about a trip he made by train from Great Britain through Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, through South Asia, then South-East Asia, up through East Asia, as far east as Japan, and then back across Russia to his point of origin. Although perhaps best known as a travelogue writer, Theroux has also published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast.

He is the father of Marcel and Louis Theroux, and the brother of Alexander and Peter. Justin Theroux is his nephew.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just like them, he was a wisp of diminishing humanity, with nothing in his pockets--hardly had pockets!--and he felt a lightness because of it. With no money he was insubstantial and beneath notice. As soon as everyone knew he had nothing, they would stop asking him for money, would stop talking to him altogether, probably. Yet tugging at this lightness was another sensation of weight, his poverty like an anchor. He couldn't move or go anywhere; he had no bargaining power. He was anchored by an absence of money, not just immovable but sitting and slipping lower.


Paul Theroux

I have met Paul Theroux several times, but the most memorable was in Seattle. I was in town selling remainder books to the local bookstores and one of my stops was the University Bookstore. I noticed that Theroux was booked to be there that night for a reading. At each bookstore stop I had that day I looked for a copy of one of his books that I didn't already own, so I could have something for him to sign. I found a copy of The Kingdom by the Sea.

I was early for the event. Paul was late.

He arrived 40 minutes late and informed us that he had been enjoying his meal and had lingered over his aperitif. I had heard stories of his arrogance before, so I didn't bother to be offended. Besides I had a book to read. He launched into this diatribe about cigarette smoking and how no one who didn't smoke couldn't possible understand just how wonderful the activity of smoking was. I don't remember what book he was touring for, but it was one of his novels. His "handler" tried to bring him back to the purpose of the tour a couple of times, but Paul was locked in on his subject. I can only assume he was not allowed to smoke with his meal and that may have triggered this lecture. I don't mean to make him sound like an ogre. He was charming, and brimming with intelligence appearing truly academic in his green tweed with leather arm patches and his glasses slightly askew on his face.

Theroux is best known for his train based travel books. I can still remember when I read The Great Railway Bazaar. I had never read anything like it before. His prose sparks with acerbic asides balanced by witty lines. He is not politically correct. He is opinionated and even at times the reader can tell his thoughts of a region are colored by one bad interaction with a native as he stepped off the train. He gets mad and can make an ass of himself. He shows his thorns and his spontaneous acts of kindness. The reader alternates between wanting to smack him in the head and shake his hand. AND yet I couldn't wait for his latest released travel book.

His fiction is a bit uneven. He has total misses and then he releases The Mosquito Coast arguable his best book and certainly his best known book. When I finally approached Theroux with my proffered offering. I launched into a impromptu speech about how much I loved his travel books. It miffed him. I had read somewhere that he was sensitive about his fiction. He saw himself as a novelist. He shoved my book back at me and dismissed me with a look at the next person in line behind me. I should have known better. I laughed all the way down the hallway and all the way out to my rental car in the parking lot. He was exactly who I expected him to be.

Ellis Hock spent four years in the Peace Corps in the African country of Malawi. He would have stayed longer, but two things happened simultaneously. The woman he was half in love with could not have sex with him because she was betrothed to another and his father dies. He moves back to Massachusetts and takes over the family business. While in Africa he had developed a hobby of catching dangerous snakes and letting them curl around his arm. The Malawians are deathly afraid of snakes and looked on his relationship with snakes as mystical. Back in Boston he has a friend that knows a woman having issues with her python. The smell of the snake, the feel of the snake sent his senses reeling back to his time in Africa.

The clothing business he inherited from his father was being decimated by imports and cheap competition. His wife had divorced him taking his family home in the process. His daughter is only interested in her inheritance; assuming, that despite the fact that she treats him with nothing short of disdain that he would still be willing to give her anything. He is 62 years old and he dreams of his time in Africa.

Hock chucks it all (not a difficult decision given his circumstances) and heads to Africa, back to the village of his greatest triumph Malabo. The village is located along the lower river and is still lagging far behind the rest of the country.



He returns to find the school he had built decimated. The people are barely at subsistence living. He is famous, though most of the people he had known before are dead. Stories of his snake handling and his teaching have been passed down to the next generation. The head man assigns him a girl to help him, to wait on him hand and foot, and also provide him with any other assistance he desires.

He first really becomes aware of Zizi when he comes upon her wading in a pool.

The whole luminous process of the girl slowly lifting her chitenje wrap as she waded deeper into the still pool was one of the most teasing, heart-stirring visions he'd ever had. Yet she wasn't a tease. The cloth inched up with the rising water, and when it exposed the small honey-colored globes of her buttocks and she half turned to steady herself, the surface of the green pool brimmed against the patch of darkness at the narrowness of her body, a glint of gold, the skirt-cloth twisted just above it, Hock felt a hunger he had not known for forty years. He stared at the spangled sunlight in the gap between her legs.

As it becomes apparent that Hock is being held captive by the village. He fights his desires along with the old memories of his triumphs in this very place. The head man slowly bleeds him dry of money. As his circumstances become more and more dire with desperation he attempts to escape. He is recaptured. Hock looked around, wishing for a snake--a fat one, a viper--that he can seize and shake at them like a thunderbolt.


African Black Mamba

Hock puts Zizi in grave danger in a last ditch effort to escape his captivity. He is tired and sick with malaria and beyond mere desperation. What we will give up to survive sometimes is very startling. He has become a ghost of the man he once was. As a woman of the village sums up: Your food has been eaten. Your money has been eaten. Your hope, too, all gone. We have eaten you.

Theroux does not shy away from the AIDS epidemic that has devastated the populations of Africa. There is a village of kids, throw aways, that have been orphaned by AIDS. The book has tones of Greene and Conrad. If you are fans of those writers you will not be disappointed with this book. Okay Paul, maybe you are more than just a great travel writer. Maybe, you are also a very capable novelist.

[Luís · Rating 3 out of 5]

By the time this book begins, Ellis is at a crossroads and hesitates after possessing the tailoring. When he learns of a woman who has a monstrous python as a pet and has started to behave strangely, he calls to give an opinion. The snake gained the sleeping habit against its owner - and realizes the animal is taking measurements of the woman and preparing to devour her. The contact with the animal, its smell, and its behavior summon sensations so strongly that it decides to return to Africa without realizing that it is on the way to its destruction and that, like the python's owner, it will have a similar destination sooner or later.
Hock leaves untimely, but Malawi, now independent, does not correspond to the dream kept in his memory forty years later. In Malabo, nothing is left of the school and the hospital; the inhabitants live off the record in a fatal lethargy, and the "white" is no longer welcome unless his pockets are lined with money. Those he had admired for his audacity and simplicity are now thieves, interested only in brutal consumerism; malaria joined by AIDS and wars followed by banditry actions. Little by little, Ellis, paralyzed, is hostage to a situation he does not control, quietly stripped of assets of physical and mental health. In comparison, he was slipping into a dramatic incapacity that refers to the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh in Handful of Dust, that English with the suggestive name of Tony Last, who ends up in the Amazon jungle, defenseless, in the hands of an older man who forces him to read Dickens' works aloud. But suppose Last is a victim of someone else. In that case, the situation that Hock reaches is only a consequence of his conception of Africa and its inhabitants, built around wrong assumptions and distorted by his idealism. While the adventures that feed his nightmare unfold - Festus Manyenga, the soba, and the inhabitants of the surrounding area are increasingly demanding, Hock tries to escape but ends up trapped in an even more frightening situation—a comparison with Joseph Conrad and a fateful journey by Kurtz on the Congo River. Conrad and Theroux based on their own experiences, crossing fiction with autobiographical data, but the first wrote Heart of Darkness as an anti-imperialist manifesto. After witnessing the cruelty and corruption that prevailed in the colonies with significant repudiation, the other view is ambiguous and, if possible, even bleaker.

[Bill Womack · Rating 2 out of 5]

I came to The Lower River with high expectations, mostly founded on Paul Theroux's wonderful travel writing. What I loved about books like Riding the Iron Rooster is true for this one as well; nobody describes unusual or exotic locales quite like him. Sadly, that's where the wonder stopped this time.

Ellis Hock was a compelling enough character in the beginning. Characters approaching old age seem to seldom get the starring role in contemporary novels, so I though it refreshing that we'd get to see him go through a late-life crisis, try to re-insert himself into his youth, to reboot his life. I found him relatable, if a bit of a downer, and the beginnings of his journey rang true. Then came Africa.

Without spoiling things too much, it's safe to say that the Malawi he remembered from his 20's was not where he found himself in his 60's. Instead of the joyous homecoming he anticipated, he was met with antipathy by the locals, quickly devolving into something far more sinister. Even as I write this, the premise sounds more exciting than what actually lies on the pages.

Maybe that's the problem; the story just lies there. It's as if the pacing itself got heatstroke early on, and couldn't be bothered to rise from the hammock for the rest of the story. Themes repeat themselves ad nauseum without gaining much in the way of insight. The characters, Hock included, rarely stray from the expected. The story arc is as flat as the lazy river itself, tepid and predictable. There are surprises sprinkled throughout the story, but they seem calibrated to drive home a single point: hungry people will do whatever it takes to find a meal. It's true, I'm sure, but is that enough to hang a novel on?

The whole exercise just felt uninspired and lugubrious. At one point, I found myself stopping to see where I was in the novel, and actually rolling my eyes that I still had half the work left to read. That's not a good sign. By the time the novel reached its sudden yet curiously anticlimactic ending, I was thoroughly disengaged from both the village and the weatherbeaten Mr. Hock.

I gave this one two stars. The first is out of pure nostalgia for the great works Paul Theroux has produced before; the second for a few interesting characters (even if they don't progress much if at all during the tale), and for his knack for setting a scene in a way that puts an armchair traveler right into the thick of the African bush. If only he'd picked up the pace, if only the journey could be said to have changed the lives of at least one of the characters... if only.

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A pilgrimage usually brings to mind young college grads or drop-outs backpacking and seeking to find “who I really am,” or the forty-something just-divorced and tired-of-the-rat-race individual plagued with ennui or provoked by accumulated reproaches. Or is it the pilgrimage to Mecca or Delphi? It does suggest a spiritual journey-- a life-defining, soul-searching odyssey.

In Theroux’s latest novel, sixty-two year old businessman, Ellis Hock, embarks on a pilgrimage. Scorned by his wife and spurned by his daughter, he decides to sell his men’s clothing business in Medford, Massachusetts, leave his home of almost forty years, and return to the “lower river” in the country of Malawi, in a remote bush town called Malabo. Ellis romanticizes this African village that he spent four Peace Corps years as a teacher in after college, and resolves he can “go back” and return to the happiest years of his life, living in a mud hut with a thatched roof, and commingling with the natives.

And so begins the expedition of Ellis Hock, to the southernmost part of a southern province, home of the Sena people, in a land of few clothes and elaborate dance rituals. He is White Man and Mwamuna wa Njoka—Snake Man; Ellis was known during his Peace Corps years for his deft handling and collection of black mambas, green mambas, puff adders, spitting cobras, the swimming sun snake, the egg-eating wolf-snake, the boomslang mbobo, and the nsato, or rock python. Hock had a knack and a confidence to govern these scaly reptiles.

Ellis was also recognized for building a school, and initiating plans for a medical clinic and paved roads. He regarded himself as a savior of sorts, the benefactor of a poverty stricken village. But did he know himself then, and the people he lived with and taught. He is confident that he will be received with open arms on his return, that his goodwill and proprietary feelings about the region, about Africa, would be recognized and embraced.

The novel of Ellis’ return to Malobo is full of surprises. Be prepared for an unorthodox narrative, unvarnished and bold, stripped of the political correct approach of progressives and alms-givers, including the well-meaning philanthropists who patronize the less fortunate, who are ignorant of their own contribution to apathy and greed—unenlightened (because of their phlegmatic sense of charity) that these uneducated, indigent people are not much different from you or me at the core. You will peer inside the militaristic supply depots necessitated by do-gooder celebrities who spread their money and smiles and food drops without having a clue about the complex nature of the regional customs and hierarchies.

Other works that have influenced this book have been mentioned in many reviews, such as Conrad’s HEART OF DARKNESS and Graham Green’s THE HEART OF THE MATTER. Theroux’s chronicled travelogue through Africa, DARK STAR SAFARI, reflects many of the themes in this story—of return, and a desire to redeem lost youth. There is also a vivid allusion to William Golding’s LORD OF THE FLIES, a ripe and menacing glimpse into primitive culture. It reminded me of a few select lines in the movie APOCALPYSE NOW, from General Corman:

“Because there's a conflict in every human heart, between the rational and the irrational, between good and evil. And good does not always triumph. Sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.”

Hock’s trek to his idealized paradise is an unforgettable life lesson, written with intelligence and raw clarity. Theroux can be a bit long-winded at times; he isn’t into economy of words. However, his technique serves the story well, with the subtle and nuanced delivery of a ruthless civilization, one that is all too ferociously human.

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book captivated me; it pulled me in; I did not want to put it down. Yeah, I liked it a lot, but if you were to ask me if it is as good as the author’s non-fiction, I would definitely say no. It’s like comparing “apples and oranges”!

The Lower River is an exciting book, but realistic. It is well written, meaning it has lines that are tantalizingly beautiful. Other lines are frightening and scary. It conveys a noteworthy message, a word of warning about aid to underdeveloped, poor countries where both famine and corruption are rampant.

Ellis Hock is sixty-two. His wife has left him. He has to figure out what to do now. He thinks back on his years in Malawi; he had worked for the Peace Corps. Then he had been in his twenties; the Peace Corps was a better alternative than the Vietnam War. Now, looking back, he remembers those years as the best in his life. He returns. The story relates what happens.

I learned from this book—about the orphan villages between Mozambique and Malawi. I learned about the indigenous Sena people of Malawi. I learned even a bit about snakes.

I like how the author acknowledges sexual attraction but does not overdo it. Moral restraints play in too.

The ending is balanced, realistic, a mix of good and bad.

Jefferson Mays narrates the audiobook. I have given his performance 4 stars. There are many African words in the dialogs and in the text. To me, who knows no such languages, I can only note that the words spoken felt genuine. Never does Mays alter his pronunciation of a given word; never does he falter or hesitate. He uses different intonations for different characters. He dramatizes, but not excessively. He knows when to pause.

Non-fiction
*Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads 4 stars
*The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas 4 stars
*Ghost Train to the Eastern Star 4 stars
*The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari 4 stars

Fiction
*The Mosquito Coast 1 star
*The Lower River 4 stars

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone who has read Paul Theroux knows one of his key themes is the American innocent abroad, refusing to acknowledge the dark side of the people he encounters…or himself. In many of his past novels, his characters are transplanted into a new culture and struggle to survive against environmental, cultural and psychological pressures.

For those who enjoy Theroux, his latest novel does not disappoint. In fact, it soars.

Once again, we are treated to an anti-hero who is forced to meet his overblown expectations head-on. And once again there are tendrils of Theroux’s own life: Ellis Hock, like Theroux himself, hails from Medford, Massachusetts and spent time in the backwaters of Malawi as a teacher during a tender age.(Theroux was actually dismissed from the Peace Corps for becoming involved in Malawi’s politics).

Now, forty years later, Hock’s business and marriage have failed, his daughter has revealed her avarice, and he decides to return to The Lower River – the poorest part of a poor country and home of the superstitious Sena people.

The ensuing tale – a tale of salvation and damnation, evocative of Heart of Darkness or Lord of the Flies – is downright hypnotic. Hock is known as the man who handles snakes in a village that fears them; this tale, too, grips around the reader, holding tight, not letting go. Hock “did not want to think that Africa was hopeless.” But in reality, “the school would remain a roofless shell, a nest of snake, the office a hideout for the orphan boys, the clinic a ruin.”

The plot twists are so intriguing that I don’t even want to allude to them; suffice to say that Theroux delves deeply into whether a healthy interest in a different culture can coincide with the arrogance and egotism that we bring to that culture. “What do you want? I’m from America. I can get food, I can find money for you,” Hock says, when placed in a potentially dangerous situation. Yet as he later discovers, “You come with money to the poor, and they are so frenzied by hunger that all they see is the money. They never see your face, and so when the money is gone, you are revealed as mere flesh: a surprise. They don’t know you.”

The most riveting parts of the story are the power plays between Hock and Manyenga, the cynical and sniveling village chief, who oppresses him with meaningless gestures of honor, baring to the core what he believes the mzungo “divinity” – the white man – is all about. There is much to mull over: “This looks such a simple place. But no, everyone lies, so you can’t know it all…If you’re hungry, you will do everything, you will agree to anything, you will say anything.” Once more, Theroux has masterfully displayed a clash of the cultures and their false expectations.

[Friederike Knabe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paul Theroux's recent novel, THE LOWER RIVER, follows sixty-something year old Ellis Hock back to Africa to connect with a time forty years ago, "the happiest years of his life", when he was a Peace Corps Volunteer and teacher in a remote village in Malawi. On and off he has been dreaming about that time and place, returning to it in his mind when wandering through his hometown zoo; his memories flooding back with a strong sense of nostalgic longing. Now that his marriage has fallen apart, his business is in decline, he sells all and, almost secretly, embarks on a return visit to the village of his dreams, Malabo. Most of the novel follows Hock's arrival and time in Malawi and in "his remote village". Malawians and expats warn him: "nobody goes there", or "abandon all hope". Yet, it is exactly what Hock is seeking: a place not touched by development, a village that has stood still, frozen in time and that would welcome him as it did all those years ago.

Looking at the highly appreciative and admiring reviews of the novel, I realize that I may be in a small minority to regard this book mostly as a fictionalized version of chpaters from Theroux's travel book Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown, where he describes his return to a remote region of Malawi that looks and feels very much like Malabo. Not surprisingly, the novel draws on the author's personal experiences, both as a traveler in the early twenty first century and as a Peace Corps volunteer there in his younger years. These close ties to physical realities, increased by the detailed descriptions of places and landscapes, make it difficult for this reader to conceive THE LOWER RIVER as a work of fiction alone. I am not fully willing to accept the authenticity of the narrative or the characters, in particular the Africans. While the story is told from Hock's perspective alone, the reader does not get a real sense of life in the community and beyond nor how the situation in the village deteriorated the way it did. Blame is touched on, but only superficially, almost in caricature style. Life beyond Hock's hut and his early morning walks are hazy background, the conditions in the villages only described as they affect Hock directly. The African characters don't come into their own; they are more like stereotypes for particular attitudes: the men and boys greedy, aggressive and devious, the women, young and old, subservient and quiet. Seeing everything through his romantic lens of a time long past where innocence and love was front and centre on his mind, Hock does not appear to make much effort to learn about Malabo's present circumstances or to understand what lies behind the hostile attitude of the community. The reader is in the role of an intimate observer of Hock's daily routines, his many frustrations and a few glimmers of hope. They can instil sympathy and compassion, but, as the narrative speed slows to a crawl and repetition, more likely, turn more and more to irritation. Hock comes across as somebody totally unprepared for his venture, or as one reviewer refers to as a typical "Innocent American abroad".

While the reader follows in great detail the ups and downs of Hock physical and mental state, I for one, missed a more discriminating portrayal of the village, its people and its challenges. The African characters are not fully developed and remain two dimensional. Malabo has been reduced to a state of paralysis due to the villagers' lethargy, caused by poverty, malnutrition, the spread of AIDS and a general lack of initiative. The village strong man, Manyenga, acts towards Hock both as a friend and an enemy. In response Hock turns increasingly passive, not really understanding or accepting what has happened to "his village". Is it possible for him to move beyond his longing for this world that no longer exists?

Influenced by my own experiences and background, I was not always willing to suspend disbelief in details of this story, starting with Hock's lack of the proper anti-malarial protection to his handling of his personal effects. Speaking the local language does not always make for good communication and Hock exemplifies this aptly. While the name Malabo may have been a fictional name for the village, the novel is set clearly against the backdrop of the actual country and towns, with real people with diverse beliefs and behaviours ... Their lives in today's world are much more complex than is depicted here.

[Petra · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first, but not my last, book by Paul Theroux. He could be a modern Hardy: the story is well told and bleak, bleak, bleak. Throughout there's a theme of entrapment; everyone is trapped in this story. Ellis Hock is trapped in a lifetime of duties, his only free & happy time being the 4 years he spent in the village of Malago in Malawi during his early 20s. At 62, he decides to go back to relive these happy years.
In the 40 years since his last visit, the country has gone from hopeful to despair, AIDS is taking its toll on the people, there's destitution everywhere. The people are trapped.
Ellis' experiences in the village of Malago are as trapped and destitute as his life and the life of the people of Malawi.
There are many themes throughout this book, all wonderfully interwoven. It's difficult to mention them all: fear, superstition, hate, Foreign Aid, mistrust, lies, destitution, arrogance, etc.
The people of Malawi are not deeply portrayed or explored. The story is told from the point of view of Ellis, so this could be explained by Ellis' ignorance of the people.
A well-told story.

[Amanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book. I had just finished reading my first Theroux book -- Last Train to Zona Verde -- and, having enjoyed it, I decided to venture into his fiction. I only got about a hundred pages in before I had to stop: not because it was boring, or poorly written, but because it seemed extremely ethnocentric and chauvinistic.

The gist of it is that a 60-something year old man named Hock decides to go back to Malawi, where he worked for four years as a Peace Corps volunteer over forty years ago. He remembers his time there as a sort of golden age. He loved the people, the land, the work. (He was even known as "Snake Man" for his (completely unbelievable) ability to catch and charm all kinds of deadly snakes. How he learned to do that was not addressed.) But now, coming back after a divorce -- his wife and daughter are portrayed as greedy and opportunistic -- he finds that everything has changed for the worse. The school that he built is in ruins. The people try to hustle him for money. It's not the idyll that he remembers, but instead a pretty miserable place.

Hock's nostalgia -- the romanticized ideal that "things were so glorious in the past" -- is part of being human, I suppose. We remember and cherish the good and more readily forget the bad. But the way that Theroux writes it, it isn't just that way in Hock's perception. Instead, thing truly *are* much worse in this tiny village in Malawi than they were a few decades ago. He (Theroux) comes across as incredibly cynical and eager to blame. And I think that Theroux is using Hock as a vehicle to channel his own anger and frustration. Theroux himself was a Peace Corps volunteer, and spent time in Malawi as a young man. And coming from his Zona Verde book -- in which he devotes a great deal of time lamenting the sad, desperate state of African cities and juxtaposing them against the "unspoiled," rural bush settlements where age-old traditions still persist -- this book reads like a platform for his prejudices. He seems to write out of the fear that poverty, corruption, and postmodernity are slowly chipping away at the beauty and decency of African village life. Thus, it's didactic and reads like a sermon, not literature.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the passage in which Hock (creepily) watches a young woman slowly disrobe as she walks into the river. There is so much wrong with this passage, on so many levels. You've got the white man and the "native" woman who is nothing more than the object of his gaze. She is not an active agent, but the object of his fantasies. She represents innocence, purity, and beauty -- everything that he remembers about this days in this (previously) glorious place. BLECH!

So that's my take on this book. As I said, I didn't read the whole thing because it was so off-putting, but I acknowledge that maybe Theroux turned it around and had Hock wake up and realize he was bringing all sorts of baggage to his physical and metaphorical return to his place of youth. I certainly hope so.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul Theroux is blessed with a consummate talent for writing and a restless nature for travel. Taken together, we readers are blessed that he combines these qualities and shares them with us. Like Jonathan Rabin (a friend of Theroux with whom, they both have informed, he swaps book galleys prepublication), Theroux is equally adept at fiction and non-, but Theroux spent some time as a young man working for the Peace Corps, in the landscape he describes as did Elias Hock, central character in this his latest book. Since that time, unlike Hock, Theroux has not been stored in mothballs but has traveled the world, writing and experiencing life. In at least one occasion, he recreated his Railway Bazaar journey of 40 years prior and chronicled it beautifully in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.

Hock's return to the Lower River to realize his over romanticized dream of the place, is a coming of age for a man of 62, awakening him to the realities of what has occurred since his abrupt departure, a rethinking of what actually was going on at that time 40 years prior, and a further realization of his place in the current world. This is a fabulous book on so many levels, at once an adventure, a thriller, a commentary. The final section of the book is a collection of thoughts on travel by celebrated writers, and more of a look into the heart of Paul Theroux -- a man who feels comfortable at home, but truly alive when on the road.

[F.E. Beyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Update after finishing: one of Theroux's best, upgraded to five stars.

My 10th Theroux novel. I've attempted 11. The one I couldn't get through was The Mosquito Coast.

While most like his travel books and are doubtful about his fiction, I prefer the latter. His travel books have some interesting bits but a lot of filler and inaccuracies. The only one I've finished is The Kingdom by the Sea about the UK.

Of the ten novels I've read, six have included parts based on his experience in Africa. The first of those was Fong and the Indians published way back in 1968 ... The Lower River was published in 2012, so he has certainly stewed over his 20s in Africa for a long time.

This time it's about returning to an African village he knew in his youth as a relatively old man. The Theroux stand-in here, Hock, is 62 -- while Theroux is now ( in 2025) 84 and still going strong.

The real strength of Theroux's work and something any younger author will find difficult to do...or at least get published... is he really explains what it's like to be in a very foreign place. Yes, foreign to the American protagonist.

I don't think books about a old white guy being taken advantage of by poor Africans are high on the list of topics big publishers want to put out there. But because it's Theroux he can do it.

Enjoying this one ... hopefully keep it at 4 stars, but Theroux does tend to go on too long. He's too famous to have an editor stand up to him and make some cuts. Oh yes, I haven't finished this yet...but no matter, nobody reads my Goodreads reviews anymore...think it's an algorithm thing. A couple of years ago, maybe 5 people would skim this. I'll make sure to make my paragraphs very short in case I pick up some skimmers.

I like that Theroux writes some awful stuff but some excellent stuff too. Makes the study of him as a human being more interesting.

[Juliana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like to think of myself as a glass half-full person but when it comes to my literature I like a half-empty writer. This explains my love for Thomas Hardy--no one can make a character's life more bleak and miserable than Hardy (see The Mayor of Casterbridge). I like to think of Paul Theroux as the modern equivalent. I don't know why but I do love to read a tragedy or about a fall from grace. Maybe it is just a reminder of how good my own life is or a my own ward against tragedy.

I was at my book club Saturday night and mentioned I had just started Theroux's latest novel, the Lower River. One of my friends said, "I hate Thereoux" and admitted to throwing one of his novels in disgust. Another friend sitting next to me said she didn't like Hotel Honolulu--too sexist. I can understand this feeling about Theroux. He often writes about the misguided American abroad in his novels--his most famous being the Mosquito Coast. His characters often have high hopes and dreams and then we get to see them dashed again and again. Even his non-fiction travel writing can seem bleak. He usually travels in the Third World, on trains for the most part and in my mind I always picture Paul Theroux sitting in a dusty depot somewhere waiting and waiting.

But getting back to his latest novel about a misguided American. In the first few pages the hero Hock receives a new cell phone and it is this piece of modern technology that ends his marriage in the first two pages. Hock as he reflects on his life realizes that his happiest memories were those he spent in an African village making a difference by building wells and a school. Hock decides to light out, telling no one and returns to the village. And of course since the author is Theroux--you can never go back. The village has disintegrated further, the school is closed and in ruins and the happiness he saw there because of a revolution has turned to despair and there is menace in the air. Hock makes more than one foolish decision and before he knows it he is trapped in the village unable to leave.

I liked the book--the opening was written by a master of story. Theroux lays a heavy hand with a treatise on poverty and the culture of aid (he in part is reflecting on his own time spent in Africa as a youth and his eventual return). The use of Snakes in the book as a theme is used a bit much. (Warning! Snakes everywhere in this book!) I was compelled to keep reading to find out what happens to Hock. I found the book to be very satisfying.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really expected more when I read this novel but my thoughts were - this is good but not great - which makes it a disappointment but not bad. Others have found the novel to be amazing - maybe I am just not a fan of Paul Theroux.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Theroux is my personal hero. He lives life on his own terms and is able to love what he does for a living. Theroux's talent for words is underrated, in my estimation, with the reading public. Everyone knows his best selling "The Mosquito Coast", but his non-fiction travel books are the best there are on the market ("Riding The Iron Rooster", his travels through China/Russia is excellent). His fiction novels have been hit/miss with me the past few years though, and I feel it's because he was at stages in his life that I was unable to relate to at the time of reading some of his material.

That changed after reading his latest "The Lower River". Theroux poured all of his experiences and reflections into the tale of Ellis Hock, a sensitive, but adventurous soul who naively ventures to a long ago past place in Africa where he spent time as a youthful Peace Corp volunteer. As the tale progresses like a slithering snake, the light dims on Hock and he faces some hard truths about himself and the world around him. He literally becomes trapped in a nightmarish Africa with disease, pestilence, and a hunger like no other. This is a novel that Theroux was destined to write and it is great stuff.

Is this novel for everyone? Certainly not, but that isn't a bad thing. Theroux is writing for himself and for his fans that really know his background at this stage in his writing career. "The Mosquito Coast" may very well still be his masterpiece, but his new novel is right behind it. Ellis Hock is no Allie Fox, but Hock is someone you can identify with, relate to, and simply care about him.

I cannot fathom where Theroux is going to go next with his writing, but this is an indication that the master is far from losing his touch.

[Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ellis Hock’s men’s clothing shop in suburban Boston is out of style and is on the verge of failure. Personally, he is as much out of tune with the times as his store. His wife of more than thirty years thinks that it is time that he graduated to a Smartphone. On his sixty-second birthday she presents him with one. But he doesn’t want it; he is perfectly content with the simplicity of his clamshell phone. For some reason, however, and this is not explained, she decides to keep it, but sets it up with his name and his email address. Now able to download his email, she discovers that he is sending oodles and gobs of affectionate, intimate messages to other women and receiving the same from them.

We don’t know if his wife was suspicious beforehand or if she did what she did out of simple curiosity. But now she is certain that Ellis is carrying on affairs with these women, all of them, but that isn’t the case at all. Christopher Hope wrote in his review of the book in The Guardian that Ellis’ wife “decides that he is a wild philanderer, when he is really just a serial emailer. Hock’s private life has been not erotic but merely electronic, and exists only in the affectionate text messages he has exchanged with kindly wives of his customers over the years.”

In any case, Ellis is trapped. His marriage is doomed. To add insult to injury his daughter demands that she receive her inheritance now because if he remarries, his new wife and her children will get everything. He bitterly complies and they turn their respective backs on each other.

When Ellis was a young man just out of college, he, like many others, joined the Peace Corps in order to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. He was sent to Nyasaland (later Malawi) in Africa to the village of Malabo on the Lower River near the border with Mozambique. He built a school and became the village’s respected teacher. His two years there were richly rewarding and they were the happiest days of his life, so much so that he applied for another two-year term. But near the end of his fourth year, due to his father’s serious illness, he was called home. His father died and Ellis became the third generation owner and manager of Hock’s Menswear. He married, became the father of a daughter, but out of a feeling of restlessness, boredom, and general unhappiness he began to email the wives who frequented his store to purchase clothing for their husbands. They responded, but only electronically.

Since his marriage is over and he is estranged from his only child and his business is failing he decides to drop everything and return to the place where he was truly happy for the only time in his life. He would go to Malabo on the Lower River. He would re-establish his place in the village and in the hearts and minds of the villagers and he would do good and he would re-capture the happiness of those years.

Well, that was the plan. But Hock has forgotten something important. He has forgotten that with time memories grow unreliable.

After the somewhat dark humorous beginnings of the novel, the plot builds slowly, but about half way the book evolves into a page turner with all the twists and turns that term entails, as Hock finds himself ensnared in his own “heart of darkness,” including an episode remindful of The Lord of the Flies. In an interview, Theroux described the plot as “the picnic that goes wrong, the vacation that turns into a horror.”

The novel is clearly semi-autobiographical since Theroux did join the Peace Corps in 1963 and he did become a teacher in Malawi in a village much like Malabo. However, he was expelled from the country when he helped a political opponent of the prime minister to escape to Uganda. Furthermore, because of his involvement in the political affairs of the nation where he was stationed, he was kicked out of the Peace Corps.

A successful novelist and literary critic, Theroux in recent times has become better known for best selling travel books such as The Great Railway Bazaar. Not only did he live in Malawi during his Peace Corps tenure, but he later travelled extensively in Africa, once journeying all the way from Cairo to Cape Town, which he wrote about in Dark Star Safari.

It is his keen eye as a travel writer, his intimate knowledge of Malawi and its people, and his gifted way with language that allows him to describe the flora and fauna, the swamps and rivers, and even the odors that make readers feel that they too have visited Malabo.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I rate this book highly although it is incredibly grim and depressing and has a couple of big flaws like repetiveness and occasionally implausible plot turns.

This is a story of lost youth and the impossibility of reconnecting with the dreams of those times. Ellis Hock is a 60-ish haberdasher who finds himself suddenly alone. His wife divorces him after finding incriminatingly intimate emails on his iPhone; his daughter is an estranged brat, and his multi-generational downtown store falls victim to Men's Warehouse.

So he travels back to a beyond-remote African outpost in Malawi, where he had some success in the Peace Corps 40 years earlier, building a school and finding an (unrequited) love, for example. He shows up uninvited and with a valise full of cash, with mostly disastrous results. Along the way Theroux indicts an entire system of corrupt officials and NGOs and the corrupt, scavenging villagers himself. His lost love Gala is still alive but an aging wreck. His only balm and hope is Gala's 18-year-old granddaughter Zizi, whom Hock can't decide whether to conquer as a lover or protect as a ward.

Flaws of the book include the unlikeability of the central character of the peremptory Hock, who seems alone and friendless with good reason. Another is the pervasive sense of hopelessness. You have to remember that in all his travels (documented in all those travel books), Theroux never seems to have met another soul he remotely liked; he is the ultimate curmugeon, which is part of his entertainment value.

This book is not entertainment. It is both gripping and haunting. Thus the four stars and recommendation. Just be prepared for a couple of sleepless nights during and after the read.

[Roger Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best novel I've read in several years, and a beautifully-written climax to a distinguished writing career. I've enjoyed Theroux's fiction and nonfiction work for many years, but this is his best work yet. A great many sentences in this book deserve to be read out loud, like small stanzas of poetry, and a great many penetrating observations on human nature and destiny will cause you to pause and reflect before continuing. Hock is an American in late middle age who loses his marriage and his business in one short implosion. His grief and bewilderment lead him to return to a remote village of Malabo in Malawi's Lower River region, where he served as a Peace Corps volunteer decades earlier. He believes, naively, that Malabo is simply too far from civilization to have changed in the least; he learns, during the course of many tragic missteps, that it has changed utterly -- as has he. The story is riveting, Theroux's eye for detail is astonishing, and you will be enchanted. Pick it up -- it flows like a mountain brook down a hill.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second reading: much the same, still good.

A small allegory of hopelessness, troubling, worrying and despairing. There is perhaps one tiny gleam of hope in it somewhere.

Technically, I admire the descriptions and the use of snakes. I can't agree with those who think this reduces Africans (or Americans) to stereotypes: but the characters are representative, for sure. His bottom line seems to be that plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, and cette chose was never a very healthy thing.

If you were nitpicking you might say that his view of development in Africa is a little behind the times, missing such aspects as Turkey in Somalia and China in the DRC, but that's how you would write a textbook, not a novel.

I think there are aspects of Nabokov in Theroux, but really he's Greene. Perhaps not innovative, but pretty bloody devastating.

[Erwin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ok this was somewhat of a disappointment. I really love Theroux's travel writing and some of his other novels but this one just didn't live up to my expectations. Too bad.

[Ezgi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Theroux çok üretken bir gezgin. Türkçe’ye yalnızca kurguları çevrilse de asıl ilginç eserleri gezileri. Bu kitabında da gezilerinden gözlemleri kurguluyor. Pek çok okurun beyaz erkeğin Afrika gözlemleri diye sinirlenebileceği potansiyele sahip kitap. Ama bu hissi bastırıp okumaya devam edince çok güzel bir anlatı önünüze seriliyor.
Yaşamında çuvallayan karakterimiz daha önce bulunduğu Afrika’ya dönüyor. Bunu hayatını noktalamak için seçtiği yer olduğunu sezdiriyor Theroux. Döndüğünde bambaşka bir Afrika görüyor karakterimiz. Değişen Afrika’yı anlattığı kısımlar rahatsız edici olabilir. Ama bununla bırakmayıp neden bu halde olduklarına geldiğinde kitap başarılı oluyor, en azından benim gözümde. Afrika’da toplum kötüye gidiyor çünkü senelerce çekmedikleri eza kalmıyor. Sivil Toplum Kuruluşları’nı da eleştiriyor. İnsanlara götürülen yardımların hiçbir işe yaramadığını, sürdürülebilir hiçbir girişim olmadığını gösteriyor. Ölmek için seçtiği yerin de öldürüldüğüne şahit oluyor. Edebi açıdan da sosyal açıdan da beni epey tatmin eden bir okuma oldu.

[Katie Llewellyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

As an American currently living in Malawi, I heard about this book and thought it might be interesting. I didn't know much about Theroux before this book, but googled him to find out that yes, he actually was serving as a PCV in Malawi in the 60s. But what really bothered me about this book is the incredibly negative way he showed Malawians. Yes, this is one of the poorest countries in the world. But from my experience (and granted, I have only been here four months rather than four years) I have not found the desperation and cruelty that are described in this book. Yes, it is different, I am living in a town in the Central Region, where things are quite different than where he described. But I have never once been approached for money (other than actual beggars who are asking anyone for money - white or African), nor have I ever felt any animosity. The first part of this book I enjoyed, but once he started going into detail about the struggles, the despair and the criminality that was going on in the village he was in, I started having problems with the book. That is not the Malawians I know. Sure, some of them are petty crooks and will steal a watch or a belt from the mzungus, but the way it is described: "First they will eat your money, then they will eat you" is absolutely foreign to me. So this book got a lower rating because of the way the people here were portrayed - as money-hungry, greedy and devious, rather than the positive, yet impoverished people I have encountered while working here. Granted, my work has not taken me to Nsanje, nor will it, but I have been to Chikwawa and only received positive reactions. I have met a PCV who is stationed in Nsanje, a ten-minute walk to the Mozambique border, and he does not have any of these stories to share either.

[Laura Lee Pirtle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book completely disturbed and exhausted me. It had me depressed, hopeful, curious, eager to continue until the end. It certainly makes me want to be careful going to Africa. It makes benefactors looks naive and ridiculous at times. It was not a comfortable read. It will stay with me a long time. What more could you ask from a book?

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are few American authors I enjoy reading as much as Paul Theroux. Whether the work in question is fiction or nonfiction, Theroux always seems to be spot on. The Lower River is no exception. So much that is written about Africa today is pure bumph of one sort or another.

What Theroux writes about is a story about going back to Africa years after an idyllic stint in the Peace Corps in Malawi. His main character, Hock, is recently divorced from his wife and bitter about his daughter's greed. After a few days of looking at the village of his dreams through rose-colored glasses, he finds he is, in effect, a prisoner of the local chief. All his money and goods are either robbed or endlessly begged away. The second half of the novel is about his failed attempts at escaping the village and returning to America -- not an easy thing in a village without electricity or telecommunications.

The only positive aspect of his stay is his love of Zizi, an under-aged teenage girl who is granddaughter of the native woman Hock had fallen in love with years ago. The book becomes a race to see what happens first: Hock's escape from the village or the satisfaction of life with a sweet and willing girl (SPOILER: No actual sex, though.)

[Basileia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una lectura muy sofocante y angustiante. Theroux nos narra la historia de Ellis, un norteamericano jubilado, aburrido y solitario, que desea volver a vivir una segunda juventud en Lower River, donde estuvo haciendo de profesor en su veintena. Su vuelta no será para nada como él pensaba, siendo al final una desilusión y una vivencia claustrofóbica, hasta complicando su vida hasta límites insospechados. Detrás de la historia de Lower River existe una crítica muy cruda de los "salvadores" que van a África esperando ser los revulsivos de la prosperidad y que, aún viéndolo muy duro, pueden acabar siendo utilizados por los nativos para conseguir dinero. Mención aparte a las serpientes (nunca había leído un libro con tantas apariciones, y reconozco que me dan escalofríos), tan presentes en este libro que son uno de los varios personajes que existen en esta novela.

[Cheryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Abandoned at 50%.

[Renee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I waited a long time for Paul Theroux’s newest book and he did not disappoint. Lower River is about a middle age man (Ellis Hock) who greatly desires to return to his beloved Africa but never thought it possible. After his wife leaves him, he returns to Malawi (the village where he spent four years with the Peace Corps in his youth).

Arriving at the worn-out village, he finds it transformed: the school he built is a ruin, the church and clinic are gone, and poverty and apathy have set in among the people.

Interweaving memory and desire, hope and despair, salvation and damnation, this is a hypnotic, compelling, and brilliant return to a terrain about which no one has ever written better than Theroux. While reading this book one truly sees the ironic depiction of misguided philanthropy in a country dense with natural resources yet unable to feed its people.

Other books I strongly recommend by Theroux: The Mosquito Coast, Dark Star Safari and Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.

[Helena Rodrigues · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nunca tinha lido nada deste autor, já estava na estante algum tempo. Li e sofri com o protagonista.

[Tabitha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have mixed emotions on this book. I debated on rating it a 3 just for the main character can be very annoying and it was a little too wordy at times. Gave it a 4 for I did finish and I was intrigued to continue reading.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very quickly takes off with a bang that got my attention away from other genres ... hypnotic, drew me in ... if you don't want to read anything that includes snakes, then don't read :-) but I found the snake knowledge to be fascinating and key to the unfolding of the main character's story. Really fascinating book for me and my first Paul Theroux.

[Raghu Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 2001, Paul Theroux went back to Africa at age sixty, traveling by land from Cairo to Cape Town as a backpacker. He wrote about it in ‘Dark Star Safari.’ Many readers viewed it as an ageing hippie trying to recapture his youth, going back searching for the Garden of Eden of his past. In the early 1960s, Theroux spent a few years teaching in Nyasaland (now Malawi) and Uganda as a Peace Corps volunteer. He also met V. S. Naipaul and Rajat Neogy in Uganda during those years. Though the dictator of Malawi expelled him from Malawi, his years there were pleasant ones in his young life. This book draws from that past and combines it with Theroux’s 2001 experience of Africa to create a tantalizing novel that begins in Massachusetts, develops and ends in Malawi. Theroux fans like me can find in this novel many of the themes, observations, and criticisms he made in ‘Dark Star Safari.’

Ellis Hock is an elderly man of sixty-two, an age where he does not encounter life-altering shocks but only subtle diminishments. He runs a clothing and tailoring business in Medford, Massachusetts. It is his family-owned business he has been in charge of for over forty years. His wife presents him a smartphone and registers it with his email address and snoops into his cache of emails over the years. It so happens Ellis had sent many affectionate emails and text messages to his female customers in all those years. Ellis was no Casanova, but his wife concludes he is a philanderer and divorces him. His selfish daughter uses the opportunity to get her share of the family wealth, and bids him goodbye. Ellis finds himself alone. With such sudden reverses in his life, he casts his mind back to the last time he felt joyful in his life.

Forty years before, Ellis had spent four happy years in the desolate village of Malabo in southern Malawi. Africa cast a green glow in his memory. Its simplicity and pre-industrial being gave him hope. So long as Africa remained unfinished, he believed there was hope for the world. He was a Peace Corps teacher there and helped to build a hospital and a school. Ellis learnt the local language of Sena, became an expert snake-catcher in the hot, malarial swamps around the village. He fell in love with Gala, a local Sena girl. Ellis wanted to marry her but Gala declines, saying her parents have already pledged her to a local man. Hence, it is important she preserves her virginity as otherwise her fiancé would disown her, causing much harm to Gala’s parents. Ellis returns to Medford after four years in Malawi. The pleasant memories of those four years rejuvenate Ellis now, and he decides he must return to Malabo.

The erstwhile ‘mzungu’ (foreigner) of Malabo flies to the city of Blantyre in Malawi and makes his way to Malabo with some difficulty. Ellis recalls the Malabo of his times. There was a school, a library, teachers, a clinic, regular visits from a missionary, and plans for digging wells and bringing electricity. But the new Malabo was not the simple, charming village he knew four decades before. The villagers show him ambiguous respect, suspecting him of having a deeper motive for visiting Malabo. He must want something from them - why else would he come all this way from wealthy America to live in a hut? Ellis feels forty years of aid, charities and NGOs had taught them that only self-interested outsiders trifled with Africa. Altruism was unknown anymore. The new Malawi welcomed foreigners and allowed them to live out their fantasy of philanthropy. It lets them build a school, an orphanage, a clinic, a welfare center, a malaria eradication program, or a church. It then determines if in any of this effort and expense there was a side benefit - a kickback, a bribe, an undemanding job, a free vehicle. Whether any of these clinics or schools ever function is immaterial to them.

Festus Manyenga, who was a onetime aid-agency driver, controls the changed Malabo. He is relentless, manipulative, obtuse and greedy for money. Ellis contacts his old love, Gala, who is a grandmother now. Gala cautions him about Manyenga and his villagers. She advises him to leave the village and go back home when he can. “They will eat your money and then they will eat you,” she forewarns him. Ellis finds that Manyenga and the villagers know he has come with a good deal of money. In their own manipulative ways, they strip him of his money over time, all along addressing him as their father or the Chief. Ellis realizes the villagers are so frenzied by hunger that they see only his money. His face is irrelevant. It means you are just mere flesh when all your money is gone. Then it is time to dispose of the flesh.

In desperation, Ellis attempts to escape to Blantyre, where there is an American consulate. But Manyenga is too crafty to let him escape when he knows Ellis still has money. He captures Ellis and brings him back to Malabo. In his own devious way, he tells him he is their Chief and the villagers are there to protect him. Ellis makes another attempt with the help of Zizi, Gala’s granddaughter. He finds himself defeated again. Soon, Manyenga strips him of all his money. Reduced to a piece of flesh, Ellis finds Manyenga is negotiating a price to ‘sell’ him off. With little time left, Ellis makes one last escape plan with Zizi’s help, which brings us to the climax of the novel.

The novel is gripping to read but bleak save for the time when Ellis is in Medford. Except for Zizi and Gala, the native people of Malabo appear pitiless, predatory, covetous or lazy. The aid agencies, charities and NGOs emerge insensitive and self-absorbed. But Theroux’s love for Africa and its people shines through despite his disillusionment with the continent.

The novel reminded me a lot of Theroux’s observations in his volume, ‘Dark Star Safari’. There, he saw Malawi descending into greater poverty, callousness and ignorance in the thirty-seven years since he was there last. Infrastructure was in utter disarray, corruption and indifference were endemic in public offices and people were often unpleasant to their fellow citizens. The wickedest believed themselves to be anointed leaders for life and wouldn’t let go of their delusion. The worst of them stole from foreign donors and their own people, like the lowest thieves who rob the church’s poor boxes. He found the kindest Africans had not changed at all. Even after all these years, the best of them were still bare-assed.

Theroux paints a caustic picture of international aid, which he believes does more harm to Africa than good. It does not let Africans take responsibility for themselves and their state of affairs. The ruling classes find it convenient that aid agencies kept bringing in money to keep the status quo. The dictators kept their citizens ignorant, while international aid played an unwitting role in furthering it. Theroux believes the aid agencies have a vested interest in roaming about in their Landrover and doing things without involving Africans in their activities.

Though Theroux has little hopes for Africa’s future, I feel history gives us hope for the better. Fifty years ago, scientists and writers in the West predicted a dire future for India because of population explosion. Theroux himself had low hopes for Malaysia and China in his books, written in the 1970s and 80s. But, all these countries have done well for themselves in material prosperity, literacy, etc., since then. So, Africa would do well for itself too, despite all the dysfunctions Theroux talks about. But the simplicity and pre-industrial nature of Africa may never persist and the modern African would be more like the rest of us. It is not such a terrible bargain if it reduces poverty, disease and deprivation on the continent.

The novel may cause some dismay among Malawians for the way it portrays them. Liberals, charities, and NGOs may dislike the way it slams their efforts. But Theroux is not new to controversies.

I liked this fast-paced novel.