Bangs and Whimpers

By Paul Gray

THE FAMILY ARSENAL

by PAUL THEROUX

309 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $8.95.

By nature of their trade, terrorists are hard to get to know. Ordinarily, they keep a low profile. When they do call attention to themselves, it is usually too late for their victims to strike up a lasting acquaintance. Fiction, on the whole, is a better place than real life to meet mad bombers--safer and, as The Family Arsenal demonstrates, more fun.

Not that Paul Theroux's seventh novel is a joyride, but it is old-fashioned entertainment in the mode perfected by Graham Greene. Theroux sets an odd quartet to housekeeping in seedy south London. They are not blood relatives; they hope to be related by the blood of others. Pa is Valentine Hood, a former U.S. State Department employee cashiered for punching an official of the South Vietnamese government. Filled with hatred, he stays high on opium and waits for a call to action from the provisional wing of the I.R.A. Mum is Mayo, who has ties to the Provos, a callow sense of Realpolitik and a Flemish masterpiece that she stole from a London museum. The kiddies are Murf, an idiot savant at wiring up explosives, and his girl friend Brodie, a pert little simpleton who totes bombs to their destinations.

Aristocratic Lesbian. Theroux manages to make this simulacrum of a nuclear family both chilling and pathetic. Hood clandestinely murders a neighborhood hoodlum, then takes on the support of the victim's unwitting wife and child. He feels responsible for his.own "family" as well and finds himself playing a stern Victorian father when Brodie is seduced by an aristocratic lesbian. Meanwhile, the threatened I.R.A. London offensive remains stalled, and a host of coconspirators barges into the complicated story. On this surface, The Family Arsenal glitters. American-born, Theroux has nonetheless acquired an ear for varieties of British speech. His book is crammed with comic dialogue and Pinteresque moments of tongue-tied malevolence. Descriptive passages are often telling and wise: "He had always hated public houses; they were dirty and uncongenial, the haunts of resignation, attracting men whose loneliness was not improved by their meeting one another."

Beneath all this, though, the novel wanders in search of a missing profundity. Outside of their mock family ties, the characters have neither significant pasts nor coherent motives. The ranks of terrorists may indeed be filled with such hollow, existential punks, but a novelist can hardly let it go at that. Theroux himself cannot seem to decide whether their emptiness is contemptible or piteous. And since they contemplate violence as an end rather than a means, they lack the framework of a political cause that might define them.

The success of The Great Railway Bazaar (1915), Theroux's engaging travelogue by train, should create a wider audience for this novel than the author has enjoyed in the past. He deserves it. At 35, Theroux is that rarest of beasts, a young writer who is getting better with each book. Paul Gray

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