Bodily Harm/The Mosquito Coast
Koltz, Newton
Wisdom & limits BODILY HARM Margaret Atwood Simon & Schuster, $14.50, 266 pp. TIE MOSQUITO COAST Paul Theroux Houghton Mifflin, $13.95, 416 pp. "The love of your own country is a terrible...
...It is much easier to live in someone else's country...
...and like so many crazies, he can be devastatingly right: Just about every target of his jeremiads deserves scorn...
...Though in her own mind she is a with-it, modern woman, Rennie is "sweet"-naive, innocent, passive, and ultimately helpless...
...Theroux is America's greatest living misanthrope writer (his travel books are mainly records of sights he loathes and people he despises), a cast of mind he uses to great advantage in his new book...
...A nice idea-a bit of time and warmth to dispel a chill deeper than the Canadian winter's and maybe an unen-tangling affair to fulfill other needs...
...Some she does well at -whew...
...And the savages can't make it...
...It helps to make living bearable and comfortable...
...Poor Canada...
...If in the end you don't much like Rennie Wilford or anybody else in Bodily Harm, be warned...
...Some she fails-groan...
...What he has in mind, though he never says this in so many words, is to build a New Jerusalem, all his own creation: a self-sufficient, appropriate technology, bio-degradable New Jerusalem in the jungle . . . Well, not a jungle, but a garden...
...Or, as Ms...
...Tempted...
...There's no chance you'll like Allie Fox in Paul Theroux's marvelous The Mosquito Coast...
...Then you are not tempted...
...Graham Greene's Scobie didn't need to go to hell after his suicide, for Greene had already condemned Scobie to spend his life in the African jungles...
...In Bodily Harm, At-wood's new novel, "exempt" is the key word...
...So Allie takes his family to the jungles of Honduras to survive . . . Well, more than survive...
...But she doesn't give herself much range...
...She moves through her life like a high school student, always taking tests...
...The idea is to hang on, stay alive...
...The self-protective shell around the Survivor tends to leave her-or him, but it is a very feminine myth-convinced of her impermeable virginity...
...His first grand, promethean project is his Quest for Ice...
...The country is going up in flames . . . and besides, he is not appreciated...
...This too fails...
...There used to be scope in this country for people like me," he says, full of self-pity...
...until Ms...
...Elation...
...After, he takes his family down to the Mosquito Coast to scavenge and beachcomb...
...Though Saints Antoine and Agathe turn out to be pretty dull, she finds success, after a fashion, in satisfying her various immediate needs...
...He'll dig canals, straighten rivers, drive off the creepies and the uglies, the stingers and the biters, and he'll sink a well to tap the Earth's heat...
...Because Ice equals civilization...
...He's less an inventor than an inspired tinkerer and gadget maker...
...For Fox intends to make it over, transform it, bend it to his will...
...Canadian heroes don't usually win, but they fail with immense dignity...
...The Island government is corrupt and cruel, the main source of revenue comes from the Islands' strategic position astride the Colombia to Miami drug route, and the opposition has power enough to force a showdown...
...Margaret Atwood Bodily Harm Mewton Kelts MARGARET ATWOOD is a literary [heroine in her native Canada...
...It's no surprise that all his dreams fail...
...Agathe...
...In fact, he's nowhere near as good as he thinks he is...
...he's funny and entertaining, though he peaches and yammers and tests them without mercy...
...War is coming to America...
...To change things," he says...
...For the U.S...
...Some years ago she wrote a book about that personality, Survival, whose thesis is this: Every nation has a kind of national symbol informing its literature and arts...
...Antoine and Ste...
...for good reason: she is a fine novelist, an even better poet, and she understands as few others do the Canadian national personality (yes, Amanda, they are different from us...
...it's of course "The Frontier,'' for Britain ' 'The Island," and for Canada "Survival...
...Luckily she emerges from it without permanent harm and with, maybe, greater wisdom and compassion...
...Rennie Wilford, a Toronto life-styles and fashion journalist, needs to recover her balance after a number of emotional and bodily shocks: Her lover has left her...
...A bell rings: how very American...
...In that event a lot of blood is spilled, the opposition leaders are murdered, the island people suffer more than ever, and "the sweet Canadian"-as the chief opposition leader, who was fond of Rennie, kept calling her-finds herself abused, beaten, and thrown for several terrifying weeks into a nasty native slammer...
...the Horror...
...It preserves, conserves...
...Fox is a solitary eccentric-but with a family, four kids (the oldest, thirteen, tells Allie's tale) and a wife endowed less with courage than understanding (how else could she endure her husband or allow her children to suffer him...
...says Rennie...
...you think he will holler from out of the burning bamboo tree...
...In return he makes for them his inventions, which are fascinating...
...And then worse...
...The horror comes, both of these very classical writers are saying, when you disregard your limits-either by overruling them, in the American fashion, or by underextending yourself, in the Canadian, Though survival after all is a gift, we do all together sometimes have a little influence over its conditions...
...Punishing one's characters, teaching them a lesson, has all the inherent appeal of punishing one's own children-with no guilt to bite afterwards...
...and one of her breasts has been partially cut away (the cancer, it appears, has been caught in time...
...But I can...
...They're there to serve, humor . . . and adore him...
...The love of your own country is a terrible curse, my friend," he says.' 'Especially a country like this one...
...It's a nation where self-assertion and success are not looked at with favor-they're probably sinful in fact...
...She believes she can remain clean, untainted, untouched, uninvaded, and exemptthus superior...
...Atwood throws her into a test that's much tougher than she ever thought she'd deserve...
...an intruder has invaded her apartment, leaving behind a coiled rope on her quilt...
...Rennie wangles a gig to write a travel piece about a newly independent Caribbean nation made up of the islands of St...
...And worse comes...
...Fox dreams: something terrible is going to happen here...
...But the Islands, alas, don't leave her alone to enjoy them...
...He constructs a huge ice factory in the tropic wilds...
...So far from God, so near the United States, and so cold...
...I AM WHO CAN...
...In Allie Fox, the misanthropic not quite genius inventor, a sort of mix of Captain Ahab and Thomas Edison, his sour imagination has found its perfect expression...
...The story about dropping a civilized man or woman among savages or into a festering banana republic is one that appeals to our more misanthropic writers...
...Atwood puts it,' 'Canadians are forever taking the national pulse like doctors at a sickbed: the aim is not to see whether the patient will live well but simply whether he will live at all...
Vol. 109 • September 1982 • No. 16
