Paul Theroux: Blinding Light

Paul Theroux has something about darkness. His new novel's chief metaphor, the blindness that grants his writer-hero a kind of numinous insight into his fellows, is worked over with such relish from start to finish that one suspects the fixation to belong not to the hero but to his author.

Thick, deep darkness abounds in Blinding Light, to the author's obvious satisfaction, from the passengers' sleep masks on a "glary one-class night flight" in its opening lines to the "Night had fallen, burying him" that begins its penultimate paragraph. These states of the night are blindfolds, unconsciousness, coma, real and phony blindness, stones on eyelids, couplings in the dark, and an erotic fixation with blindness that surprisingly is allowed to take over the book's motive power.

In a sense, whether you will enjoy this novel depends on whether you share its author's erotic interests. It has often been this way with Paul Theroux.

Blinding Light starts promisingly. His prose is as irritable as ever: on a journey to the far east of Ecuador his hero Slade Steadman, a best-selling travel writer both snobbish and waspish, is like an irascible chipmunk running around taking sharp little bites out of the human jungle.

Steadman has known early success with a book called Trespassing, which, along with its merchandising, has made him rich. Since then, for 30 years, there has been nothing — a colossal writers' block. He goes on what he imagines is a personal adventure into the dark heart of Ecuador, in search of "the tiger's blindfold", the king of psychotropic drugs which he hopes will cure his block.

He returns home with a temporary blindness that is also the elixir of creative insight. For a year he dictates his new book to girlfriend Ava, the book that will reveal, with uninhibited access to his sexual past and fantasies, the true Steadman. Then he finds he has become truly blind.

What I like about Theroux's writing — what is genuinely seductive — is its energy, its vividness of annoyance and of noticing about his fellow humans. He sees that people say the most absurd things as if they were normal.

And as a novelist he does possess a power of (selective) sympathy: to begin with, Steadman is passionately interested in the workings of shamanism and the effect of the drug — that makes for interesting reading. Once these problems are resolved, however, he is passionately interested only in himself.

If only the sexual autobiography that resulted from it were not so obviously a repetitive and uncompelling catalogue, maybe that could also interest us.      

- INDEPENDENT


* Hamish Hamilton, $35