Swan Song

By R.Z.Sheppard

THE CONSUL'S FILE by Paul Theroux

Houghton Mifflin; 209 pages; $8.95

"I tried to be moderate and dependable," says the young American diplomat-narrator of Paul Theroux's latest fiction, "for the fact is that colorful characters--almost unbearable in the flesh --are colorful only in retrospect." For ten years now the productive Theroux has been transforming the unbearable flesh encountered during his wide travels into pleasurable pages. His eight novels include Girls at Play, Jungle Lovers and Saint Jack, whose settings and atmospheres were drawn from the author's years as a Peace Corpsman in Africa and a teacher in Malaysia.

For The Consul's File, the author returns to Malaysia where, among other things, he attempts to bury a romantic genre made popular by W. Somerset Maugham. Theroux has small patience for old Willie. Nailing one aging expatriate who spent most of his life drinking at the local white man's club, Theroux's mouthpiece observes that "he had failed at being a person, so he tried to succeed at being a character--someone out of Maugham. What tedious eccentricity Maugham was responsible for! He made heroes of these timeservers; he glorified them by being selective and leaving out their essential flaws."

Those flaws have been fatally enlarged by recent history. The book's nameless narrator has been sent to the Malay village of Ayer Hitam to close down a U.S. consulate that has outlived the prosperity of the American-owned rubber plantations that once flourished there. The Viet Nam War is over. In literary time, it is post-Heart of Darkness and The Ugly American. The real action now takes place in far-flung Hiltons, where multinational businessmen confer in the Esperanto of global trade.

At the club where Ayer Hitam's old colonials quietly fade away, time has congealed around 1938. One old boor is revealed as a pseudo reactionary because "he had no politics, only opinions, pet hates, grudges, and a paradoxical loathing for bureaucracy and trust in authority." A Japanese businessman who is cold-shouldered on the tennis courts exacts revenge by elevating one of the club's Malay ball boys to guest status. "The war did not destroy the English," writes Theroux. "It fixed them in fatal attitudes. The Japanese were destroyed and out of that destruction came different men."

The debacle in Viet Nam created some different Americans too. A veteran Foreign Service officer recalls that in Saigon discontented "dependent wives" sympathized with the V.C. "They talked about 'our struggle' as if there was some connection between the guerrillas shelling Nhatrang and a lot of old hens in the embassy compound refusing to make peanut-butter sandwiches."

In Theroux's Ayer Hitam, cultures no longer collide; they sort of frisk each other. "Between jungle and viability, there is nothing," he writes, "just the hubbub of struggling mercenaries, native and expatriate, staking their futile claims." Among them is Margaret Harbottle, one of the ubiquitous breed of freeloaders who roam the world as travel writers, and a toadish old sultan called Buffles, who keeps the past alive with elaborate polo parties. The village itself is a cultural stockpot of Chinese secret societies, Communist cells, Indian sports clubs and groups calling themselves the South Malaysian Pineapple Growers' Association, the Muslim League, the Legion of Mary and the Methodist Ramblers.

Yet the ominous spirit of the mysterious East is not entirely dead. It surfaces in the pain and hallucinations of breakbone fever, in a Malay medicine man who is accused of turning into a weretiger to commit murder, and in a chilling description of the noxious Midnight Horror tree: "The flowers are pollinated by bats which are attracted by the smell and, holding to the fleshy corolla with the claws on their wings, thrust their noses into its throat; scratches, as of bats, can be seen on the fallen leaves the next morning."

Through his "moderate and dependable" narrator, Theroux produces a complex batik of exotic impressions and cool, clear perceptions. If his book is an appropriate souvenir rather than an imposing artifact, it is perhaps because the author no longer shares those beliefs and urgencies that once dramatized the expatriate novel. Theroux would probably agree with a character in John le Carre's forthcoming thriller The Honourable Schoolboy--a literary agent who observes that "nobody's brought off the Eastern novel recently, my view. Greene managed it, if you can take Greene, which I can't -- too much popery. Malraux, if you like philosophy, which I don't. Maugham you can have, and before that it's back to Conrad . "

--R.Z. Sheppard

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