The Consul's File

Spencer Monroe Savage

by Paul Theroux

The Consul’s File is a journey to post-colonial Malaysia with a young American diplomat, to a “bachelor post” at the uneasy frontier where civilization meets jungle.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Travel, Asia, American Fiction

212 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

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

[Daren · Rating 3 out of 5]

The new American Consul arrives in Ayer Hitam, Malaysia and immediately finds the expats are a mixed bunch. Initially I thought Ayer Hitam was going to be a fictional place, but it isn't it is a real place, in the state of Johor, just north of the Singapore border.
The books takes the form of chapter length short stories. The are slightly interconnected - in that the characters reoccur, the key characters are present in almost every chapter - but more importantly they are told in the order they occur - they are linear. The closest example I can recall is Narayan's Malgudi stories, set in the fictional town of Malgudi. Again those stories are stand alone, but interconnected.
There is a good variety of stories - mostly about people, but also a Christmas party, visitors, the drama society, a murder mystery, a witch doctor, and a mix of other things, until the consuls departure is imminent.
An easy, short read, that perhaps doesn't reach the highs of Theroux's other full length fiction examples. Still an entertainment.

A solid 3 stars.

[Zuberino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superb collection of short stories, set in the Malaysian town of Ayer Hitam in the rubber jungles of Johore. Back in the 70s, Paul Theroux spent a couple of years in the Far East, around the time that the American military effort in Vietnam was collapsing in shame and acrimony. Theroux was only 36 when he published this book, but on this evidence, he could have been mentioned in the same breath as Somerset Maugham and Joseph Conrad as a chronicler of the East had he been content to plough this particular furrow. But that was never going to be Theroux’s style; so footloose was he that he eventually came to be known as the Anglosphere’s foremost literary traveler.

In the meantime, you have these short stories which in their attention to time and place are a memorial to a lost world. The world of white planters who dealt in rubber and then palm, who went in as the advance guard of colonial commerce and got left behind as so much sea wrack when the tide of empire retreated in the 60s and 70s. Theroux is superb in his evocation of the heat and dust of the Malay tropics, outlining this strange humid world in prose so taut that it ought to be taught to students of the short story as exemplars of economy and compression. He has an unsentimental take on the anachronism that is planter society, collecting each evening at the town's Club to drown its quiet desperation in copious quantities of whisky and gin. Neither does he have any inclination to romanticize the “natives” – Malay, Tamil or Chinese – although he is not beyond suggesting that there is some truth to ingrained racial stereotypes.

What we get instead is the gimlet eye of Theroux’s unnamed bachelor diplomat, honest and plain, occasionally witty, generally sparing in his judgment but speaking volumes between the lines. There are acerbic portraits: the “Empire’s orphans” celebrating an imaginary white Christmas that they are never going to see in real life; marital shenanigans of bored planter wives; the arrival of upstart Japanese businessmen and American dropouts post-Vietnam. Theroux is not afraid to test his range: hence we get ghost stories, grisly murders, even a nifty piece of detective fiction. Four character sketches stood out for me, even more than most: the American anthropologist who goes full-blown native, the two Tamils, Rao and Sundrum, the former a failed revolutionary, the latter a failed writer, and finally the abandoned Chinese girl Nina in the story “Triad.” Entertaining, piercing, unsettling in equal measure.

At the end of his two-year stint, the consul writes a valedictory note, coming to the conclusion that perhaps there is no “there” there after all. He points his finger squarely at wrinkly old Willie Maugham for creating a fantasy fictional universe that the mundane reality of Malaya is forever trying to catch up to. As Anthony Burgess said in his NYT review, Theroux nailed the reality instead.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, my opinion of this book is improved. Not that it was bad before, but in the first few stories in this collection I had detected too much of a Graham Greene influence and too many of the stories or ideas for them seemed to be in self-conscious homage to Somerset Maugham's Far East stories.

By the time I got more than a couple of stories into the collection I began to appreciate the unique qualities of Theorux's writing. This is worthy of at least a paper length discussion, but Theroux's style is understated and unassuming. At first he seems deceptively transparent, rather simple, and his style is so natural it seems pretty much unadorned.

But there is a post-Vietnam ethos in these postcolonial tales of the Far East that is anything but simple. There is also a unique American literary quality to the writing which sets it apart from the work of Greene and Maugham who, despite their personal beliefs, were nonetheless citizens of a country which was one of the, if not the, largest colonial power in the pre-1945 world.

I like Paul Theorux. His writing is honest and not contrived. The style is pedestrain and easily approached, yet there are deeper meanings and messages though you may not always be aware of them until you start to think about what you are reading.

"The Coconut Gatherer" is a good example of this. It seems on the surface a fairly simple story of a Western writer's two visits to the home kampong (Malayasian village)of an native writer. Its a story that virtually repeats itself in the recounting of two separate visits with subtle differences. Its an unsettling story because it doesn't tell you how to feel or what to feel, but it leaves you feeling a bit disturbed by the differences between appearance and reality and between what someone says they feel or think and what they actually do. Tied up in that is the distance caused by differences in race, language, history and culture.

Deceptively simple yet very complex stuff.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paul Theroux, The Consul's File (Ballantine, 1978)

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. ***

[Elisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a story book; every chapter a different anecdote on South East Asian life as an expat. It holds different writing styles; horror, romance, travel, satire. Each is compelling, relaying a deeper message than the story itself. It can be read as a portrayal of human character and of a parable of universal dreams and flaws.

The writing is very fluid and pleasant. Theroux doesn't spoon-feed you his message, the reader is left to draw her own conclusions.

I loved the last chapter, it's an essay about traveling, life and writing in general.

[Stu Glauberman]

In a New York Times review, British novelist Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange) muses that when Britain’s professional meddlers retreated from The East, Americans filled the vacuum. More recently, I’ve observed that when Americans left a void in Southeast Asia, Australians eagerly took up diplomatic, economic and cultural initiatives. Life goes on ob-la-di, ob-la-da.

In The Consul’s File, a youthful American diplomat who remains nameless narrates the comings and goings of Americans and British expats in the fictional town of Ayer Hitam. Never important, the tiny town is languishing as its rubber plantations, a symbol of British colonialism, shut down to make way for oil palm estates.

In 20 stand-alone stories, Theroux is at his best describing “the Empire’s orphans” – quixotic Malay, Chinese, Tamil and mixed-race characters – as they interact clumsily and cannily with each other and the expatriates who play fateful roles in their lives.

The polyglot locals are engaged in Chinese clans and secret societies, Communist cells and Indian sports clubs while the expats wile their away time smoking, drinking and playing tennis at the Club, where it’s perennially 1938 but it hasn’t been decided who will play which roles in the next Footlighters Drama Society production.

Here and there, Theroux tosses in details of the ex-pat lifestyle: dealing with amahs and jagas, drinking Tiger Beer, smoking mentholated cigarettes, taking malaria-suppression tablets like Communion, and devouring a 16-pound holiday turkey brought up from Singapore’s Cold Storage company.

Four women are notable among the Americans in the file. A shapeless, graceless teacher of English claims she was raped by an oily attacker, who may be a spirit. An anthropologist goes native in the jungle and marries an aboriginal chief. A skinflint travel writer’s shtick includes never paying for anything. An older-wiser U.S. embassy secretary, who had a fling with the consul in Kampala, invites him to the Raffles Hotel to discuss “diplomatic relations.”

Sadly, the “moderate and dependable” consul is a cheese sandwich in a land of sambal and spicy food. He makes a few tricky decisions but doesn’t embark on any real adventures. He’s nothing like Jack Flowers, who wheels and deals down in Singapore in Theroux’s Saint Jack. From the outset, the uninvolved consul senses that Americans won’t last as the professionals who pulling the strings in Southeast Asia. He begins by describing his assignment:

“It was my job to phase out the Consulate. In other places the consular task was, in the State Department phrase, bridge-building; in Ayer Hitam I was dismantling a bridge – not a difficult job: we had never been very popular with the Malays.”

This collection was published in 1977 although some of the stories seem to have been written years earlier. There is an early reference to being in the Federation of Malaysia, which melded Malay sultanates with Singapore and Borneo into one country until it broke up in 1963. Theroux taught at the University of Singapore for four years beginning in 1968, the timeframe of these stories. Mixed with his memories of Malaysia, Theroux shoots a few darts at the State Department for its failures and ignominious 1975 retreat from Vietnam.

A flinty U.S. diplomat named Flint complains that mollycoddled, malcontent Foreign Service wives in Saigon supported the Viet Cong by nagging and nagging.

“They talked about ‘our struggle’ as if there were some connection between the guerrillas shelling Nha Trang and a lot of old hens in the embassy compound refusing to make peanut butter sandwiches. It’s not funny. I knew lots of officers who were shipped home – their wives were a security risk.”

When a polo-playing American planter is hacked to death in Ayer Hitam, the Consul notes that a resurgence of revolutionary zeal is to be expected as “a natural result” of America’s collapse in Vietnam.

The consul’s ex-lover, who enjoyed a Saigon posting in an air-conditioned embassy compound, envisions a day when both she and the Consul are posted to Hanoi. “It won’t be long,” she prophesies.


--------------

The British literary lion W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) traveled in British Malaya in the 1920s. Wherever he went, he was a prolific profiler of the Colonials who kept the lights of Empire burning.

In the mid-1950s the British novelist Anthony Burgess was a teacher in the British Colonial Service in Malaya. Burgess wrote three novels based on the experience. The American anglophile Paul Theroux taught at the University of Singapore soon after the island state became independent, having been shunted out federation with Malaya. Theroux wrote two works based on the experience.

Both Burgess and Theroux were fascinated with Maugham’s Colonial-era heroes and “time-servers.” Theroux sprinkles references to Maugham throughout The Consul’s File. In fictional Ayer Hitam, contemporary players strive to channel the eccentricities of Maugham’s play “The Letter,” and tales out of Maugham are repeated as if they had actually happened in the town.

As a veteran Malaysian hand, Burgess wrote Forewords to books by both Maugham and Theroux. In his New York Times review of The Consul’s File, Burgess wrote:

Maugham is always around somewhere, even in the post-Vietnam age, sardonically sipping gin pahits on the club veranda, observing exilic adulteries…”

See Maugham’s Malaysian Stories with a Forward by Burgess, and Burgess’s Malayan Trilogy — but don’t expect to find many Americans mucking about in Malaya.

https://www.amazon.com/Maughams-Malay...

https://www.amazon.com/Malayan-Trilog...

[Thanushya · Rating 1 out of 5]

Linked short stories not my cup of tea. As an Asian I could not relate to any of the stereotypes that was mentioned in this book.

[Raghu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paul Theroux is best known for his travel writing. I have enjoyed reading many of them though I have never read his works in fiction. This book comprises twenty short stories that capture life in the small town of Ayer Hitam, Malaysia. All the stories have the same few characters in town, but each story stands on its own. The events take place in the 1970s, fifteen years after Malaysia’s independence from Britain. We see glimpses of the local Malay, Chinese, and Tamil communities and also that of the British expatriates.

Theroux spent some years teaching in the late 1960s in the Makerere University, Uganda and in the National University, Singapore. In this book, he portrays life in Ayer Hitam from the viewpoint of a young, unmarried American Consul who gets posted there. Theroux did not live in Malaysia, nor did he ever work in the US Foreign Service. It is possible what he experienced in Singapore influenced his portrayals of Ayer Hitam. The young consul arrives in Malaysia from his previous posting in Uganda with the assigned task of phasing out the consulate. As consul for the next two years in town, he observes and takes part in varied events. They range from murder, ghosts at night, political machinations, meeting a former lover, adultery and so on. I found the stories ‘The Flower of Malaya’, The Autumn Dog, The Tennis Court, The Johore Murders and The Butterfly of the Laruts’ more striking than the others. I would pick ‘The Tennis Court’ as the most delightful one of the lot. It is about a Japanese tennis player who plays at the British expatriates’ club, much against the wishes of the expatriates. They try hard to expel him from the club, but the Japanese guy is careful not to give them any excuse to do so. Still, the expats find a bureaucratic way to ban him from playing there for breaching a rule. The story has a nice ending where the Japanese guy gets his revenge in his own guileful way. However, more than the stories, it is the observations about the expatriates, writers, post-colonial societies and the art of writing itself that captured my interest. It appears I read it more like an assemblage of essays than short stories.

British expatriates permeate most of the stories. Their lives, their attitude towards the local Malays and Chinese, invite comparison with Somerset Maugham’s portrayal of colonial life in South East Asia. Many reviewers and journalists have compared the book to the writings of Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene. It seems Theroux expected such comparisons and wanted to pre-empt them. In ‘Dear William’, he gives his take on Maugham et al. with, “What tedious eccentricity Maugham was responsible for! He made heroes out of timeservers (the expatriates) and glorified them by being selective and leaving out their essential flaws. He gave them destructive models to emulate, and he encouraged expatriates to pity themselves. It is the essence of the romantic lie”. This is vintage Theroux and reminds you also of Joseph Conrad!.

In ‘Dear William,’ Theroux makes observations on Westerners and expatriates who remain in post-colonial countries like Malaysia. He strips it of its much-vaunted romanticism and says: “It is easy to get to countries like this. But it is very hard to leave, which is why all of us who don’t belong must leave. We crave simple societies, but they are no good for us. Up to a point - if you are young or curious enough - you can grow here.; after that you must go or be destroyed. Is it possible to put down roots here? I don’t think so. The Chinese won’t, the Tamils can’t, the Malays pretend they have them already, but they don’t.”

In the same chapter, Theroux’s take on post-colonial countries like Malaysia reminds us of V. S. Naipaul. Theroux looked up to Naipaul as a mentor during his time in Uganda. He says: “Countries like this are possessed on the one hand by their own strangling foliage, and on the other by outside interests - business, international pressures (as long as they have something to sell or the money to buy). Between jungle and viability, there is nothing - just the hubbub of strangling mercenaries, native and expatriate, staking their futile claims”. This must have sounded like a hard indictment of Malaysia in the 1970s when Theroux wrote the book. However, Malaysia seems to have had the last laugh, at least for now. Fifty years hence, globalization has changed the world a lot. Developing countries like Malaysia have done well to become modern in parts and traditional and religious in the rest. But it sure looks like a country that is viable, modern and one that has kept the jungle and the mercenaries well away.

Theroux was a married man with children when he wrote this book. But he opens the story ‘Diplomatic Relations’ with some incisive observations on the condition of the single man with, “I imagine that couples often forget they are married. I know that a person who is single remembers it every day, like a broken promise, that dwindling inheritance he is neglecting to spend. The married ones remind him of his condition—children do, too. He feels called upon to apologize or explain..... and the words are loaded: bachelor means gay, spinster means ugly.” Though the author wrote it fifty years ago, it rings true even today, though I have paraphrased the last sentence for today’s PC times.

When the time comes for the consul to leave Ayer Hitam, he packs his bags and declares in the expatriates’ club that he is leaving. He says once the expats know you are leaving, they treat you as if you didn’t exist. You become an ineffectual ghost. They see you as disloyal and one who ceases to matter. Conviviality dies once you end your membership in the club. Elsewhere, the consul’s remarks on fiction seem to have a parallel with this. He says characters in fiction do not vanish after we turn the last page. They have other lives, not explicit or remarkable enough for fiction and yet it would disturb one to think they were irrecoverable. He says novelists who write autobiographically amuse him. He finds it full of credulous self-promotion with limited vision. How can one’s own life be more interesting than other people’s lives? Anonymity consoles the consul, making him an unrepentant eavesdropper.

The book shows us the exotic seduction of Malaysia as it was fifty years ago. It is fascinating to read the impressions of an American in a country that was long a British colony. Before Theroux, British writers painted almost all the images of Malaya and Singapore. Hence, this is refreshing and I found it an entertaining read. Fans of Paul Theroux would like it, finding glimpses of the later Paul Theroux in this early work.

[Ethan Hulbert · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF. This book is 212 pages and I stopped reading around page 70-80.

What a shitty book. Total trash. Thought this was going to be some sort of espionage or spy thing, perhaps political. No, it turns out it's a fictional story of a guy who goes to work at an American consulate in Malaysia, and then each chapter is a different story about different people he meets or encounters, all adding up to nothing at all.

The stories are hopelessly racist and sexist and misogynistic and culturally terrible and just plain mean. Or just plain stupid!

One story is about how some guy got a wife who kept losing everything - that was her character trait, "always lost things" to the point of losing anything he gave her, things around the house, constantly and permanently - huh?? And eventually he went from being annoyed to finding it funny and laughing at her. Okay... and then one day they went hiking and she went off to go on some separate path and then left him for dead and never saw him again, and he was happy that he was finally rid of her except then he realized that really she just lost him too, except the story is told from HER telling of it, so we don't actually know what he was feeling, and again no one ever saw him again so he may have just died. Ha ha, story over, next chapter!

Next chapter is about a couple of expats who got divorced, and the woman moved to a different country and hooked up with a teenage guy in the hotel for a while, then made friends with his mom. Okay...

Then there's a chapter about how a woman moved there for cultural outreach or something charitable or whatever, and they all made fun of how ugly she was or something like that, and she got a native boyfriend, then he raped her, then she called the police and he was locked up and put in prison, but then she was raped again by who she thought was the same guy even though this guy was in prison, and in the end it was determined to be a very slippery ghost of the jungle that just rapes women sometimes. What the fuck?????

This was a pretty awful book and I'm not going to waste any more time reading it. Paul Theroux is an incredibly poor, untalented writer - literally one chapter was almost all dialog of people just talking about drinking at a Christmas party or whatever, just pointless. And if the point was to paint a picture of a place, it failed pretty hard, because you're not given any details on the place, the atmosphere is described using freshman writing terms, and some stories don't even take place in the same country. Lmao.

In summary, waste of paper.

[Chinmay Hota · Rating 3 out of 5]

A young and sensitive diplomat arrives at Ayer Hitam, a remote Malaysian town in the heart of a dwindling rubber and palm plantation region, with a brief to close the American Consulate there. The book is the recounting of the diplomat's experiences, opinions and findings about the place and its people. The events that trigger the stories are nothing if not dramatic, starting with his arrival meeting with a garrulous woman, who turns out to be paranoid. The narrator subsequently meets ghosts, encounters murders of expats, witnesses the blood chilling consequences of black magic, dysfunctional marriages, a kidnapping attempt and other such sensational events.

He also meets people like him, who despite the apparent differences in style and thinking, gradually convince him about their similarity at the core. Here, I have in mind his meeting with Sundrum, the only novelist from Ayer Hitam, who wanted to be a coconut gatherer.

Ayer Hitam is the confluence of Malay, Indian, Chinese, Tribal and expat cultures and the underlying tension born out of the one-upmanship of different races is all too evident, or at least, that is what the writer makes it out to be.

The narrator is introvertish, keen on observing people, and forming opinions on them. He is distant and non-committal in his social sphere. But he is conscious of the impression he leaves on others--about his bachelorhood, about his role as a representative of US government and so on.

"I know that a person who is single remembers it every day, like a broken promise, that dwindling inheritance he is neglecting to spend. The married ones remind him of his condition—children do, too. He feels called upon to apologize or explain.....and the words are loaded: bachelor means queer, spinster means hag."

Despite his being utterly self-conscious, he is not inward looking: he revels in observing people around him and making intelligent guesswork about their motives. He writes,

"I've always been rather amused by novelists who write autobiographically: the credulous self-promotion, the limited vision, the display of style. Other people's lives are so much more interesting than one's own. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and I find anonymity a consolation."

Ayar Hitem really comes alive through his sensitive eyes.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Theroux wrote The Consul's File in 1972, no doubt drawing from his experiences teaching in Singapore in the late 60s. The stories are set in Ayer Hitam, a remote Malaysian town in the heart of a dwindling rubber and palm plantation region. I suspect he chose this area to deflect criticism of people he may have encountered in Singapore that served as models of the characters in the consul's story of people he met there. I see this novel with a central character (the stand in for the author) recounting stories of people he has met in a particular place is one that he would reuse to great effect again in Hotel Honolulu. I think this character allowed Theroux to give his impression of SE Asia at that time, for example:

He was what some people called a reactionary; he was brutal and blind, his fun was beer. It had swollen his little body and made him grotesque, a fat red man who (the memory is more tolerable than the experience) sat in the Club at nine in the morning with a pint of Tiger and a can of mentholated Greshams, drinking and puffing. Smoke seemed to come out his ears as he grumbled over the previous day's Strait Times.

Here's another:

Fiction is often fatal; it hallows some places and makes them look like dreamland: New York, London, Paris-like the label of an expensive suit. for other places it is a curse. Ayer Hitam seemed tainted, and it was cursed with romance that was undetectable to anyone who was not sitting on the Club verandah with a drink in his hand.

It was another successful fictional account of life elsewhere

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cannot be compared to the experts in this genre of colonial fiction, namely Maugham for short stories, and Orwell for capturing so well the atmosphere of the British Raj in Burma. Perhaps more comparable is Anthony Burgess's Malayan trilogy, for covering the same locality and period with it's multi-ethnic cast of characters, except Theroux's stories do not follow any plot line, just a collection of the protagonist's experiences over 2 years as a diplomat based in a small town in 1970s Peninsular Malaysia.

The stories themselves were a mixed bag, ranging from the supernatural and mythic to murder mystery and daily life at the expatriate club house. Nothing terribly exciting but well crafted short fiction nonetheless, suitable for a leisurely read while lounging at the pool of some old colonial style hotel I imagine.

[John]

The consul is a young American sent for two years in a Malaysian town, Ayer Hitam. The file is really a series of interconnected case studies of the people he comes across at the Club, in his role as consul, and through connections: a short story on each. Some are inconsequential, others weird, horrific, funny: a Malay ghost that rapes women, a medicine man who turns into a rapacious tiger, bizarre happenings to club members, a girl with leper parents, which together paint a colonial portrait of expats, locals, deadbeats, and the culture of almost nihilism they create. A mixed bag, all very well written of course being Theroux but I detect some padding. The consul is a self effacing figure very clear when meeting up with an exlover (this story didn’t quite ring true).

[Shakti Biswal · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

Certainly not the first Paul Theroux book one picks, I came across it at a random 2nd hand book stall. It’s a collection of 20 stories based in Ayer Hetman, a tiny outpost in Southern Malaysia. The protagonist is the American consul posted at this sleepy village in the 70s after his stints in colonial Africa, his task is to see the closure of the consulate. The outpost has some white characters along with a mix of Malay locals, Tamils & Chinese traders. It borders on folklore & gossip floating around the village like the still tropical air which is so stifling for everyone living there.

My top picks: Loser wins, Dengue Fever, Pretend I’m not here, The Tennis Court, The Johore Murders

[Cat {Pemberley and Beyond} · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wavering at the 3.5 mark. This book's made up of a series of colonialist vignettes. At times I couldn't believe this was set in the 70s as the stultifying "club" atmosphere, and casual racism could have been lifted straight out of a Kipling book.
In spite of this, Theroux's snapshots felt real (or as real as any of that bizarre world can feel). The gothic horror story added a much-needed change in tempo.

[Sarah F. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t enjoy this book as much as the others, I’m a big Theroux fan. I did appreciate the backdrop of all the stories, there was some history, interesting facts and a good insight into expat life. I love the ~Far East and having lived in Singapore for a while, reading this brought back vivid memories.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a nice and decent read with an interesting setting of Malaysia. The lead character is a US Consulate with a relatively dry sense of humour and observant eye. Some interesting short stories about the varied community living close by.

[Carole Hazell · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good, quick read: short anecdotes of life in small town Malaysia, as the rubber plantations are being replaced by palm oil. The final story rounds everything off very neatly.

[Arvind · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not very gripping

[Belinda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good collection of short stories.

[Brendan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite as entertaining as the sequel, which serves me right - I guess - for reading them in the wrong order.

[SophieJaneK · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and quaint collection of stories about aspects of life in the consulate. Theroux writes with an easy style which is very engaging.

[Carmen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of short stories set in Malaysia. The new Consul describes various characters he meets there.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting set of fictional short stories set in Singapore and Malaysia during the seventies, as told by an American consul stationed in the small village of Ayer Hitam during a two-year tour of duty. Somewhat bleak, but Theroux paints a picture of a time and place in history. He doesn’t hesitate to give reference to Somerset Maughan and that author’s writings of the same region.

[BC · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my first taste of Theroux's fiction, and it was well worth the read. I could detect some of his travel writing in the book, especially his ability to take a reader to an exotic locale and make it believable. This book benefits from being written by someone well-acquainted with the expat lifestyle.

I found myself liking the main character more as the book progressed. He is keenly aware of his outsider status among all the different groups in his small Malaysian town. He isn't a permanent expat, nor is he a local. Rather, he ends up walking a nice tightrope between the two - something the book does a good job of reflecting. In fact, the character himself seems to think about exactly this situation, especially while contemplating the absurdity of "the Club" and other expat rituals.

All in all, this book was an enjoyable read, and I look forward to finding the "London Embassy" sequel soon.

[Matthew Gibb · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great collection of closely intertwined short stories about the fictional life of an American Consul in Ayer Hitam,Malaysia. There are murders, a witch doctor who becomes a tiger,a teacher who contracts dengue fever and even a dalliance for the bachelor consul narrator of the stories. This is book 1 of 2 and the 2nd. book, The London Embassy,I didnt like as much,but both are worth your time and the short chapter can be read in 30min. Another great book that's a bit auto-biographical,since Theroux indeed spent time working in neighboring Singapore.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting collection of stories narrated by a young American foreign service officer in a small Malaysian town in the 1970s. The stories varied in their quality, but there were some interesting insights and thoughts about the slow fade of colonialism. One or two of the stories were actually a little scary, with unsettling images that stuck with me for a couple days.

All told, I enjoyed the book. If you're in the mood for some light reading that may or may not provoke any thoughts, I'd recommend it.

[David Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short collection of short stories is set in Malaysia. I'll always think of Malaysia in terms of Joseph Conrad's books, especially "An Outcast of the Islands". Theroux's writing is not dissimilar to Conrad's. Each story is very interesting and some are quite touching in a strange way. The story "The Autumn Dog" is chilling. All in all a good read.

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

i'm a sucker for fiction set in exotic locales. and this one is all about southeastern asia, a place i've never actually been, which makes me like the book even more. nothing especially great happens, plot-wise, but theroux has a knack for atmosphere and setting that makes the whole thing work.

[Rebecca]

Picked this up because the author was a Lonely Planet Malaysia recommend. What a truly fabulous collection. Terse and lovely these stories are very "modern" but with a strong emphasis on what it is to be a colonial power in a macro and micro sense.