Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux

Published by Mariner Books on February 6, 2024

One pleasure of reading lies in the vicarious opportunity to live a different life, if only for a few hours. One pleasure of reading Paul Theroux is that he transports the reader to unfamiliar places, to lives unlike our own. Burma Sahib takes the reader into the life of young Eric Blair as a supervising officer in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma during the 1920s, before Blair began to publish novels under the name George Orwell.

Blair hates the nickname “Lofty,” a reference to his height. He attended Eton, suffered the beatings by faculty and older boys, passed up the usual path of an Oxford education and a life of privilege, and is now taking a probationary position as assistant district superintendent of police in Burma. At the age of 19 (he will turn 20 in 1923), Blair has accepted a three-year contract and will need to repay the cost of his passage (and incur his father’s wrath) if he quits. The novel’s initial chapters begin with Blair’s travel on a ship that is sailing to Mandalay and follow him to his first posting.

Great Britain is administering Burma as a colony, taking its resources and offering a dubious path to “civilization” in return. The constables Blair supervises are Burmese and Indian. Natives automatically refer to Blair as Sahib, but he is expected to become a Pukka Sahib, a title that suggests both authority and an exemplar of gentlemanly behavior. Unfortunately, most Pukka Sahibs are gentlemanly only toward other white Europeans. They belittle, berate, and beat Burmese and Indians without giving their ungentlemanly behavior a second thought.

The novel follows Blair through various postings in Burma, most of which don’t end well. He has unfortunate encounters with a rogue elephant (Blair is too violent in the opinion of his superior) and with a crazy man (Blair is not violent enough). To his colonial bosses, elephants are more important than Asians because elephants help the timber industry make money and are less easily replaced than native workers.

Blair was raised to believe in the correctness of British colonialism and in the superiority of white men, the British foremost among them. His views are both reinforced and challenged as he performs the duties of a police superintendent. Blair has a grandmother and a few other relatives near Mandalay, but he is distressed to learn that his uncle Frank married a Burmese woman who gave birth to Kathleen, Frank’s “half caste” daughter. Blair is afraid that his superiors will learn about the relationship and will make disparaging comments about him behind his back. His disgust with people of mixed races eventually causes him to feel disgusted with himself for not judging people on their merits rather than their parentage.

Blair is pleased to encounter a friend from Eton in Burma and is equally distressed when he learns that the man is engaged to a Burmese woman. His concerns are defined less by his own prejudices against Asians than by his fear that he will be judged for having friends and relatives who are willing to mix with natives. At the same time, Blair enjoys the sexual company of Asian women. Sometimes he has to pay for it, but a couple of his postings come with a young Burmese woman who is expected to keep him happy at night.

Blair eventually agrees to sponsor an Indian — one of his few friends in Burma — as a member of his social club, knowing that he will be criticized and even ostracized for daring to bring a nonwhite through the club doors. Placing friendship above social position is a transformative decision, similar to Huck Finn’s moral decision to risk God’s wrath by helping Jim gain his freedom.

Theroux pays close attention to the minor characters in Burma Sahib, including Blair’s police colleagues and his relatives. He gives each of Blair’s lovers a distinct personality, but none of them (apart from the white woman with whom he has an affair) are happy with Blair’s unwillingness to make their relationship permanent. One of those women contributes to Blair’s undoing. The married white woman who occasionally shares his bed has a dirty mouth (by the standards of her time) and Blair finds it exciting to encounter naughty words and ideas that he never seen in books.

Blair's fullness as a character is impressive. Theroux paints Blair as an isolated man who prefers his own company to that of others. He holds his secrets dear, even when the secrets are not worth holding. He gives the impression of being a blank slate and avoids spreading clues about who he might really be. He hates the assumptions that the British make about him when they learn he attended Eton. Blair despises most people, whether they are white Europeans or Indians and Burmese who have darker skin. He only seems content when he is reading or struggling to write poetry. Jack London, Kipling, and Somerset Maugham have the most impact on his literary sensibility, while E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India fails to speak to his own experience.

Theroux is a masterful storyteller. His descriptions of 1920s Burma make the reader scratch mosquito bites, gag at the odor of open sewage, and feel disgust at white colonists who feel privileged to treat everyone with dark skin as a servant. If Theroux occasionally makes points a bit redundantly, those points are always important to the story. The primary point he makes in Burma Sahib relates to Blair’s ability to change his thinking (to become "woke" in current parlance) after observing the unfairness both of British colonialism and of racial or ethnic prejudice in all parts of the world. Blair’s formative experiences have a liberalizing (and thus humanizing) impact on Blair, turning him into the author who will later question authoritarian rule in 1984 and Animal Farm. Burma Sahib is a fascinating portrait of Blair’s intellectual and empathic development. At the same time, it is a fascinating story of a young man who comes of age in an unfamiliar and challenging world.

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The Bad Angel Brothers by Paul Theroux

Published by Mariner Books on September 6, 2022

Paul Theroux always takes me to worlds far from my own. Surfers in Hawaii (Under the Wave at Waimea). The jungles of Honduras (The Mosquito Coast). High-end escorts in London (Doctor Slaughter). The Bad Angel Brothers is set in more familiar terrain — the East Coast and Arizona), albeit with trips to Alaska, Columbia, Zambia, and the Congo — but the subject matter — prospecting for gold and jewels in the modern world — is well beyond my experience.

Still, after scenes are set, the novel becomes a domestic drama, the kind of drama most readers have either experienced or closely observed: sibling rivalry, failed marriages, the acquisition and loss of money. I enjoyed the settings and the prospecting more than the core story, but I never lost interest in the protagonist’s plight.

The Belanger brothers are polar opposites. Frank is a successful lawyer, admired by most residents of his small community, apart from the clients he cheats. Frank is a hypocrite who pretends to help his neighbors while only helping himself. Cal leaves his brother and the community behind after earning a degree in geology. He becomes a prospector, finding peace in solitude. He discovers enough flakes of gold in Arizona to support himself before contracting with mining companies in South America and partnering in a small emerald mine in Zambia. His hometown views him as an outsider, even when he returns to visit his mother. Frank is seen as the reliable brother, the one who stayed in time to share his success.

To please his mother, Cal endures uncomfortable lunches with Frank, but Frank is insufferable. Frank steals Cal’s stories and envies his success. When he loses his assets in a divorce, Frank borrows money from Cal and tries to swindle Cal out of repayment. When his mother wants to give the family home to Cal, Frank persuades her to add his name to the deed to assure that the brother with a secure job will always be there to pay the mortgage. In fact, Frank is not to be trusted — a lesson Cal learns when his own divorce rolls around, despite his hope that he has been giving his brother insufficient credit.

The domestic drama has a contrived feel. A competent lawyer could put a stop to Frank’s shenanigans and probably have Frank disbarred, circumstances that detract from the story’s credibility. Cal’s grievances about Frank are legitimate but they become redundant. Theroux piles on evidence that Frank is dishonest and a bad brother long after the case has been made.

More interesting is the arc of Cal’s life: his marriage, followed by prolonged absences from home to pursue business opportunities that he hides from his wife; his chance encounter in the Arizona desert with the member of a Mexican drug cartel; his relationship with a woman in Zambia; his dangerous trip to the Congo, where he placates his wife by investigating Chinese companies that put children to work in cobalt mines. Cal experiences more adventure than most of us could manage in five lifetimes.

One of the novel’s highlights is Cal’s comparison of rocks to people: undifferentiated aggregate surrounding an occasional unpolished emerald that is distinguished by its impurities as much as the “glittering and verdant garden” of its interior. Cal compares the inclusions in precious stones to Frank in the way they devour the light. That’s clever writing.

Theroux strives for a suspenseful ending but given the nature of Cal’s character, it never seems likely that the story will proceed to its telegraphed destination. I suppose Cal is blinded by anger, but the final pages had me wondering why it took him so long to devise the obvious remedy to his problems. While the journey in The Bad Angel Brothers is better than the destination, the journey is too rich in detail to be spoiled by the disappointing ending.

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Under the Wave at Waimea by Paul Theroux

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on April 13, 2021

Paul Theroux’s new novel takes as its plot the life of a surfer. For a time, his life seems too superficial to sustain a plot. Joe Sharkey is a high school dropout, a stoner who — apart from a gig in his youth as a lifeguard — has never had a job. Millionaires envy Sharkey, “they wanted his friendship, they praised his life, the life he had made out of accident and desperation and dumb luck, his whole existence a form of escape, fleeing to the water to be himself and protecting himself on land by telling lies about his life.” Sharkey seems mindlessly happy, untroubled because he is disconnected from the ordinary concerns that plague the rest of us. How could such an empty life be interesting? In the literary hands of Theroux, anything is possible.

As the novel begins, Sharkey is 62, still surfing, but battling aches and doubts. He is a legend whose fame and skills are both diminishing. Theroux is 80 and, at least as a writer, has not diminished a bit. The story is about aging, but it is also about atonement and the search for meaning in life. In the novel’s last third, Sharkey’s mindless happiness has become mindful regret. There is more to life than happiness, Theroux reminds us. Under the Wave at Waimea suggest that true happiness can’t be attained without true understanding. “If I don’t know myself,” Sharkey asks near the novel’s end, “how can you possibly know me?”

The story is told in three parts. The first and last take place in Sharkey’s present. The middle of the novel constructs the details of Sharkey’s life. As an Army brat whose father wants him to go to West Point and serve in Vietnam, Sharkey gets kicked out of a private school for smoking weed and refusing to rat out his source. He’s ostracized as a haole in a public school but escapes the bullies by isolating himself on a surfboard. Over the years, building a life from sun and sea, Sharkey wins competitions, gets endorsement contracts, has sex with beach bunnies, and travels the world, never once reading a book or thinking that his life is missing anything worthwhile. He forms a superficial attachment to Hunter Thompson but never troubles himself to read the autographed copy of a book that Thompson gives him. Eventually Sharkey meets Olive, a kind and patient woman who loves Sharkey despite his faults, including his self-absorption, his unthinking failure to make her a meaningful part of his life.

The novel’s first part leads to its defining moment as a buzzed Sharkey, driving in the rain on a dark night while telling Olive a story from his past, hits and kills a homeless bicycle rider. Sharkey tells the cop who shows up that he hadn’t been drinking. The cop, recognizing Sharkey as a legendary surfer, doesn’t seem interested in investigating the death of a homeless man. When Olive presses Sharkey to discuss his role in the death, Sharkey dismisses it as inconsequential, but something about the death changes Sharkey, reduces him, makes him feel his age and steals his motivation to surf. Sharkey’s near drowning and Olive’s miscarriage send the message that a dark cloud is hanging over a life that Sharkey has always regarded as sunny and carefree.

The last part of the novel picks up the story of an unfocused Sharkey who is smoking too much weed and surfing too little, still refusing to acknowledge the importance of killing another human being. Tired of listening to Sharkey respond to her confrontation with “he was a homeless drunk,” Olive embarks on a quest to reconstruct the man’s life. He might have been a homeless drunk when he died, but she learns that he was much more than that during his life. Even in hard times, he was a trusted friend, an inspiration to those who knew him.

The quest takes Olive (with Sharkey in tow) to Arkansas and back to Hawaii, where they meet men who have fallen on hard times, including some Sharkey knew in his childhood. Olive forces Sharkey to add up his life, the life in which he feels so much pride, and stack it up against the remarkable highs and tragic lows of the life made by the man Sharkey dismisses as a “drunk homeless guy.”

Theroux is among the best painters of word pictures. From faces to fingernails, from rocky shores to moonglow on a distant headland that looks like “an outstretched paw,” Theroux’s descriptive prose invites visualization. Hawaii, of course, is a remarkable place to visualize. Theroux captures not just the beaches and waves but the beauty of a culture that values integrity and truth while practicing the ugliness of racial judgment. Sharkey believes that Hawaii’s beauty is pure, that everything ugly about the islands — drugs, shoes, plastic bags, crime scene tape — comes from the mainland. Sharkey only belatedly wonders whether he is part of the ugliness that has contaminated the native purity.

There is a lot to unpack in Under the Waves at Waimea. To some degree, the novel is about white privilege. Sharkey is a haole, scorned by many native Hawaiians until he proves himself as a surfer, but he gets endorsement contracts that better, native surfers never seek. Late in the novel Sharkey is accused of having “snobbed” his native peers. For the most part, the novel is about self-discovery, about the importance of kindness and the need to put aside self-satisfaction to live a truly happy life. But it is also about setting aside judgment, about recognizing the complexity and value of others, about not basing opinions on one sliver of a multi-faceted life. There is some redundancy in Theroux’s effort to make his points — there isn’t much subtlety here — but the points he makes are important and the story is both moving and memorable.

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Murder in Mount Holly by Paul Theroux

First published in the UK in 1969; published by Mysterious Press on December 6, 2011

Originally published in Great Britain in 1969, Murder in Mount Holly is one of Paul Theroux’s early novels.  A prologue introduces its three main characters:  Herbie Gneiss, having unwillingly dropped out of college, must even less willingly find a job so he can support his gluttonous mother after his father’s death.  Mr. Gibbon is an aging veteran who walks around town carrying wrinkled paper bags when he’s not working in a war toy factory.  Miss Ball, a kindergarten teacher who collects products with catchy names, rents rooms in her house to Herbie and Gibbon so she’ll have extra money for the school janitor, with whom she’s having an affair.

“If you don’t laugh, you’ll go crazy,” says Herbie.  Murder in Mount Holly offers ample opportunity to increase your daily laughter quotient.  Theroux’s characters have ridiculous conversations, filled with non sequiturs and nonsense, and yet they all seem real, like recordings of conversations your near-deaf and slightly dotty grandparents might have with each other.  The older characters -- Gibbon, Ball, and Herbie’s mother -- are barely in touch with reality, living their lives in a past that never existed.  They are racially and religiously intolerant, wedded to political views that make Barry Goldwater seem like a pacifist.  To prove that they “still have a lot of spunk left,” they turn to crime, somehow justifying their scheme as a blow against communism.  It’s no surprise that things go wrong from the very start.  Meanwhile, Herbie gets his draft notice.  The old folks are delighted; whether he comes home is less important than their familiarity with someone who has been called to battle the communist menace.

If the story seems a bit dated, if Theroux’s targets seem too obvious, if the novel is less substantial than Theroux’s later work, the humor that inheres in his eccentric characters and absurd dialog endures, in the way that old Woody Allen comedies will always be funny.  I recommend Murder in Mount Holly to fans of offbeat comedy for that reason.

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