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Published on March 7, 2008

Reminded Paul Theroux about London's Sunday Times warning that "Kingdom by the Sea", his book about circumnavigating the British coast, was "best avoided by patriots with high blood pressure". I asked him if he thought the Indian tourism board might take a similar view to his new book "The Elephanta Suite".

"Yes," was the reply.

 

Does that matter?

No. But then imagine the tourism board's reaction to "Passage to India", or any Asian tourism board's reaction to a Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene book. I think I've set back tourism 50 years in most of the countries I've written about.

 

You lived in England for 17 years. Do you miss it?

Not really. I drank London to its dregs. Also, London is now a young person's city. In journalism and publishing, everyone is under 40.

 

In "The Elephanta Suite", one character describes the "Indian surprise": "India attracted you, fooled you, subverted you, then, if it did not succeed in destroying you with the unexpected, it left you so changed as to be unrecognisable." Is that inevitable for foreigners who visit?

It is for Americans. In the book, they expect to find something magical and are invariably disappointed. They get involved, and the more they get involved the less they understand. They are looking for a particular India - I was going to call the book "The Indian Surprise". It's not inevitable, but India is not Southeast Asia. It's not Thailand. A lot of foreigners in Thailand who have lived here for 20 years have never been there.

It's a mind-blowing place, but it's not mind-expanding necessarily. It terrifies some people. You get to a point where you think you're in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. People are begging with no arms. So where do I put the money?

You published "Saint Jack" in 1973 about Singapore, "Kowloon Tong" in 1998, and now "The Elephanta Suite", all novels about the lives of expatriates in a strange culture. Do you continue to have an affinity for writing expat fiction set in the old British Empire?

Possibly so, because the first experience I had overseas was living in Nayasaland - a British territory in Africa - and got to know English, Indians, some Chinese and Africans, all living together. They hung out a club and I found it amazing, like Orwell's "Burmese Days". I was fascinated by the colonial manners, but more intrigued by foreigners getting into difficulties.

Today there are more expats, more nationalities, and its obviously more complex now, and I'm not sure I understand the ease with which people come and go. It's kind of marginal to the culture. But people live different lives in different places.

If you were looking for a parallel to expat life, there's a new American advanced-posting programme where you have one guy in, say, Juba, in southern Sudan. He's on his own, running the post that might become a consulate later. I find that terrible isolation fascinating. Its like the Conrad story, "An Outpost of Progress", where you have two guys - one kills the other one and commits suicide.

Why are novels better than travel pieces in capturing the essence of a place?

The novel is better because it's more impressionistic, more imaginative, and because a novel can persuade you of the truth of a place. A travel book tries to do that, with documentary, dialogue and description, but it doesn't always get into the head of a person. It doesn't always penetrate other mindsets. People have to come alive in fiction, and you have to persuade a person that that's the truth.

The great thing about fiction is that it should be indistinguishable from the truth. And you think, "If that person doesn't exist, he could have existed." It shows you a human side of it. There are emotions you can't even approach in a travel book. A travel book I see as somewhat two-dimensional.

The writer Pico Iyer once told me that we can't change human nature, we can only know it. In that sense, do you think the world is going to hell in a hand basket, or do you believe that the better nature of our angels will prevail?

That is a major question, Roger.

You are a major writer, Paul.

[Theroux laughs.] The world is changing in both positive and shocking ways. In the 1980s I asked people in Shanghai what they thought was going to happen there in 20 years' time, and they said they had no idea because they didn't even know this was going to happen, so how could they possibly guess what would happen in the future?

After all, 20 years before was the Cultural Revolution. They were throwing people out windows, they were marching people down the street with dunce caps on, so for 10 years China was in terrible chaos and no one knew what was coming at the end of it.

In 1986 people said this could be the next superpower, and I said, "You've got to be joking." You had people walking around in Mao suits and wearing slippers down muddy lanes, working under 25-watt bulbs, and this is the next superpower? Well, I was totally wrong. My point is, in 20 years time, you won't recognise Bangkok - or London.

 

Are you an optimist?

I am pessimistic in thought but an optimistic in action, seeing how badly people can behave, and how things can fall apart just like that. What do I think? There are too many people, there's too little fuel, and there's not enough concern about pollution.

But I am fortunate to have lived in the turbulent, optimistic '60s. Going to Africa when independence was coming along, seeing India before India became interested in electronics, the old China, and also seeing how they transformed themselves.

I don't know what is going to happen, but one way to imagine what might happen is to look at the past. If you're truthful about the past, you see it very clearly, and if you're truthful about the present, you can somehow work out where we are going.

I don't know where it is, but it is very easy to destroy a society. Zimbabwe is an example. Burma is an example. It's not hard to run a place into the ground. All you need is bad government, tight borders and greed. But you can't destroy people because they will always find a way of living.

You can't think of a worse fate than the Khmer Rouge running Cambodia - Year Zero. To me it was worse than the Holocaust. A whole country levelled. No one was trusted. Burma is falling apart, but people have found a way to live there.

 

Is America going to have a Democrat president?

Let's hope so.

Roger Beaumont

The Nation