Blinding Light

Published on October 29, 2007

By Paul Theroux

Published by Penguin

Available at Asia Books, Bt395  

A journey through disillusion to truth is also what animates the hero of this, Theroux's latest work of fiction.

Writer Slade Steadman is famous and rich for the travel book "Trespassing", but 20 years on he hasn't published anything else and is suffocating under the weight of its success. In search of something to write about, he takes a drug tour to the Ecuadorean jungle with his girlfriend Ava and returns with a head full of visions and enough of the psychotropic plant that delivered them to last him a year.

The drug he takes every morning is the blinding light of the title, rendering him sightless in the outer world but opening the doors to his imagination. The surface of the world melts beneath the flame of Steadman's new insight, and every person he meets is cruelly stripped bare of pretension and persona.

But he discovers that the source of the flame is sex, and with this new "truth" embarks on an inner journey of erotic exploits with Ava, dictating his new work, "The Book of Revelation", as he goes.

At this point - about half way through the book - this reader began to doze off now and again in the fug of Steadman's fantasy world with its repeat descriptions of new horizons of debauchery. But the sense that our hero had made a deal with the devil and was about to pay the price was building all the time - he had found the levers of divine power but had hidden from his ordinary self in the ordinary world to do it.

The pace picks up with his fall to earth when he realises that the drug no longer works and has left him blind to both the outer and the inner reality. It also leaves him dependent on Ava and helpless prey to the sexual fantasist she has become. He sees too late the destructive selfishness of an eroticism given free reign.

 In an effort to save his sight and sanity he returns to the South American jungle and the shaman who opened his eyes at the beginning of the book.  

With his favourite motif of travel at the centre of this tale, Theroux takes readers on a journey full of insights into big themes like Sex, Power and the Imagination. He hits the buffers too often, though, pleasing himself with lengthy descriptions of a visceral world of horror and desire that, brilliant at first, begin to cloy after a while. Like its hero, this book goes deep but feels a little too self-indulgent.

The Uncommon Reader

By Alan Bennet

Published by Faber

Available at Amazon.co.uk, £6.44 (Bt420)

Beyond the kindly but brisk and intelligent figure that Queen Elizabeth cuts in public, not much is known about the British monarch's character by her subjects. The empty space was given shape recently in the film "The Queen" and now Alan Bennet has had a go at a royal portrait in print.

This one strays a little further from the facts, though, something that's hilariously obvious from the first words he puts in the queen's mouth, spoken to the French president at a Windsor state banquet: "Now that I have you to myself ... I've been longing to ask you about the writer Jean Genet."

The notion that Her Maj is a keen reader - the premise of this novella - is amusing enough, but the idea that she would be breathlessly inquiring, soup spoon in hand, after the notorious homosexual thief of French letters is tea-spluttering funny. The president hasn't a clue, the first in a long line of people - from her courtiers to the crowds she meets at public functions - who are left dumbfounded in the wake this new ruling passion.  

Occasionally, "one of her subjects confessed to a fondness for Virginia Woolf or Dickens, both of which provoked a lively [and lengthy] discussion. There were many who hoped for a similar meeting of minds by saying they were reading Harry Potter, but to this the Queen [who had no time for fantasy] invariably said briskly, 'Yes. One is saving that for a rainy day,' and passed swiftly on."  

Bennet describes the queen's accidental encounter with a mobile library in the grounds of Buckingham Palace, and Norman, the gay kitchen hand she finds reading there, who becomes her unlikely companion and guide to the greats of literature. Little details in others once far beneath her notice begin to catch her imagination and she realises that her life has been packed with events full of historical significance, but that it's largely passed her by.

All is not lost, though, and Bennet fashions a great twist at the end of a sparkling comedy and witty hymn to the power of reading.

Rod borrowman