Backwaters and Eccentrics

By Paul Gray

THE MOSQUITO COAST by Paul Theroux; Houghton Mifflin; 374pages; $13.95

The story is just getting started when a minor character tells Charlie, 13, the narrator: "Your father's the most obnoxious man I've ever met. He is the worst kind of pain in the neck--a know-it-all who's sometimes right." This is accurate and fair warning. Allie Fox is a ranter and raver, a Maine-born Yankee of bullying and slightly crazed ingenuity. To accompany him on a shopping trip is to be lectured on U.S. civilization and its discontents. He tells everyone who will listen that the end is near. Reports Charlie: "He said the signs were everywhere. In the high prices, the bad tempers, the gut worry. In the stupidity and greed of people, and in the hoggish fatness of them." The country will soon collapse into class war, he assures his son: "When it comes, I'll be the first one they kill. They always kill the smart ones first." He is also the dominant, inescapable presence in The Mosquito Coast.

Rendering such a loudmouth tolerable would tax many a novelist. Author Paul Theroux, 40, manages to make Allie pleasant, if exhausting company. Seeing him through a child's eyes helps. Charlie does not look on his father as an itinerant handyman. "He's a genius," he assures strangers. And indeed, Allie does more than talk. On a whim, he bundles his wife, Charlie, a younger son and twin daughters off the Massachusetts farm he has been working and takes them to Honduras. He explains: "I once ate a banana from Honduras. That tasted mighty good, so I figured why not migrate?"

This move puts Theroux, the author of eight earlier novels and three collections of stories, on the kind of ground he has successfully worked before: a primitive backwater populated by eccentrics and obsessives. Allie pays $400 for an abandoned jungle settlement called Jeronimo. "It's about as unimportant as a place can possibly be," he says happily. "You talk about starting from scratch. Well, Jeronimo is scratch." Within weeks, Allie's manic energy transforms a rank, overgrown clearing into a neat, well-ordered community. As he keeps improving his creation he boasts, "The Iron Age comes ... A month ago, it was the Stone Age ... digging vegetables with wooden shovels and clobbering rats with flint axes. We're moving right along. It'll be 1832 in a few days! By the way, people, I'm planning to skip the 20th century altogether."

His grandest accomplishment is an enormous machine that can make ice without benefit of electricity. Once he gets the contraption running, he starts hauling chunks of frozen water to neighboring villages, trying to impress the natives with a tangible example of progress in the tropics. He is messianic about his ice: "It's the beginning of perfection in an imperfect world. It makes sense of work. It's free. It's even pretty. It's civilization." Unfortunately, the machine that churns it out depends on what Allie calls "poison," a highly volatile mixture of hydrogen and enriched ammonia. It is an accident waiting to happen.

When the inevitable occurs, the novel abruptly shifts from an improbable idyl into a grim farce. Allie's quirkiness becomes derangement. He mistakes the destruction of Jeronimo for the obliteration of the U.S. and decides that he and his family must hide even deeper in the wilderness and endure greater discomforts. Charlie's loyalty begins to waver as every day brings new evidence that his father is crazy.

In his earlier fiction, Theroux sometimes revealed a curious streak of misanthropy. It was not that he disliked certain characters, but that he did not care enough about them one way or another to justify their presence on the page. That is not true of The Mosquito Coast. Charlie, the author's mouthpiece, is too young to be cynical or blase. Fate, in the form of his outrageous father, has handed him an amazing series of experiences, and he recounts them with enthusiasm and love.

He also tells more than he knows. On the surface, his narrative is an old-fashioned adventure story, episodic, rambling, full of exotic surprises. Beneath all that activity, though, lie several conclusions that Charlie himself does not draw. Shaved of its excesses, Allie's critique of contemporary life is valid. There is ever less elbowroom for the individual; submissive cooperation with increasingly remote and mysterious forces has become the order of the day. And Allie's fate suggests that the trend is irreversible. He undoes himself because he carries with him the civilization he thought he had abandoned. He explains his itch to improve the wilderness: "Why live like savages? In the end, Robinson Crusoe went back home! But we're staying." His delusion is emblematic of the age: he runs but he cannot hide. --By Paul Gray

Excerpt

"The manager of this hotel was an Italian named Tosco. He wore a silver bracelet and pinched our faces too hard . . . Tosco liked Honduras. It was nice and cheap. You could do anything you wanted here, he said.

'What's the president like?' Father asked.

'He is the same as Mussolini,' Tosco said.

This name darkened Father's face, and with the shadow of the word still on it, he said, 'And what was Mussolini like?'

Tosco said, 'Tough. Strong. No fooling.' He made a fist and shook it under Father's chin. 'Like this.'

'Then he'd better keep out of my way,' Father said."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.