End of empire
BOTTUM, J.
End of Empire Paul Theroux's Impressive Tale of Hong Kong By J. Bottum The novelist Paul Theroux has always known just one true thing—that the human heart is greasy, sweated, and small. And it...
...And with his vision of the ceremonies of the handover of Hong Kong as nothing but a monstrous cotillion—clumsy, mocking, and obscene—danced in pairs by a gangster and an aging rake, Paul Theroux has produced his best book in 15 years, the best possible setting for his sour view of why human beings do the things they do...
...Through his mother's greedy, sneering machinations and his own weakness, the illegal deal is done and his mistress snatched away...
...Hung, a mainland Chinese businessman who greets Bunt one day with an offer to buy the factory in an illegal, offshore payment...
...And it's always so wet...
...Though born in Hong Kong, Bunt has no interest in its natives or their culture—"The city," writes Theroux, "was no more real to him than the signs, which he could not read, the Cantonese language which was just a grating noise that did not remotely resemble human speech...
...From his first novel, Waldo, in 1967, through The Mosquito Coast (1982) and on to My Secret History (1989), he has peopled his nearly 30 tightly written, sharply argued books entirely with characters so unpleasant the reader can barely stand to turn the page...
...Against Hung's onslaught, Bunt has little defense and comes quickly to see that the old, casual British style of imperial exploitation is no match for the professional gangsters about to claim the colony...
...Though Bunt tries to brush off the Chinese buyer, he finds himself within a week entangled with the man who seems to know all about him—giving gifts to his factory mistress, materializing beside him as he enters a brothel, seducing his mother with visions of ready money, and perverting his friends with promises of easy cash from the Chinese government after the handover of the city...
...In Chicago Loop (1990), the semi-autobiographical My Other Life (1996), and other recent works, he has tried with little success to turn his focus primarily upon himself and to place his dyspeptic tales in such First World cities as London, New York, and Chicago...
...Makes me want to spew...
...An American by birth though based now primarily in England, Theroux is probably the most widely traveled writer in the world, and he has always kept watch on the pretensions of Americans and Europeans abroad...
...And into both his lives there suddenly walks Mr...
...Naipaul and began his lifelong fascination with the Caribbean novelist of Hindu descent whose A Bend in the River (1979) remains the classic work of modern colonial literature...
...When the partner dies suddenly, the indecisive and atrophied Bunt finds himself forced to confront alone the impending "Chinese take-away," as Betty insists on calling the British retreat from the colony...
...This was the future of Hong Kong," he realizes, "a Chinese system of threats and bribes and crookery...
...And it isn't even true, most of the time...
...Such knowledge serves him well in Kowloon Tong, where the British ruling class are pale, pudgy pimps, and their Chinese replacements are gangsters, cannibals, and thieves...
...Bunt has a second, hidden life in which he uses his factory girls for casual sex and frequents a Hong Kong whorehouse called the Pussy Cat Club...
...At dinner one evening, "his face so contorted by his chewing that he seemed to have no eyes," he spits a piece of chicken's foot onto his plate and leans over to tell Bunt's mistress's roommate, "I want to eat your foot...
...The girl is shepherded off by Hung and disappears that night...
...But with his latest novel, Kowloon Tong, a story of the impending British handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese, Theroux may finally have found a setting and an occasion worthy of his long-standing distaste for human beings...
...Far more convincing were his earlier books, set for the most part out on the rim, in the backwaters of empire where—in Theroux's view—white men in rumpled white suits and soiled white hats cling to their antiquated colonial privileges...
...Betty, despite her 50 years in Hong Kong, calls the locals "Chinky-Chonks" and despises Chinese food: "All the grease, all the glue...
...In a small moment of self-understanding, Bunt blames colonial life for "the way it cut off people's roots and made them selfish and sneering and greedy and spineless...
...But with his sharp topographical eye for the features of a city, honed by nine volumes of non-fiction travel-writing, and his usual crisp prose, the author makes the book work...
...Theroux is as fine a writer as anyone could possibly be who has never glimpsed much more than the crabbed part of life divorced from anything resembling kindness, charity, or love...
...A good general rule for readers of fiction is to suspect the timely, and Kowloon Tong shows some bumpy seams that apparently couldn't be ironed out in time for publication before the British give the city to the mainland Communists: The brief but jarring attempt to make Bunt a sympathetic lover three-quarters of the way through the novel seems little more than a spasm of authorial regret that a second editing would have removed...
...The best turn in the novel is the way Betty Mullard's passive vulgarity, selfishness, and insularity are revealed to be positive sources of evil against which the spineless Bunt cannot stand...
...As the novel opens, Neville Mullard—a 43-year-old Englishman still living with his mother, Betty, and still called by his childhood nickname of "Bunt"—is managing "Imperial Stitching," a clothing business founded years before by his deceased father and a local Chinese partner...
...Possessing a prose of astonishing precision and an eye for the kind of pointed, quirky detail that made bestsellers of his non-fiction accounts of train-travel in The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) and The Old Patagonian Express (1979), Contributing editor J. Bottum, associate editor of First Things, last wrote for The Weekly Standard about Thomas Pyn-chon's Mason & Dixon...
...While a young man posted by the Peace Corps to Africa in the early 1960s, he met V.S...
...Hung himself—described by Theroux as punching out a number on the phone "as though putting out its eyes"—is revealed to be an agent of the Red Army and possibly a cannibal...
...But the gradual awareness that he loves and must protect the Chinese mistress he has been exploiting—the gradual awareness that England ought to have loved and protected Hong Kong—comes too late...
...Though he never managed the older novelist's sympathy for the human condition, Theroux did learn from Naipaul that the story of European imperialism was not a drama of gods and demons, of madmen cursing the heart of darkness, but a series of small betrayals, little prostitutions, and the occasional petty murder—by both the empire-builders and the natives who eventually rose up to supplant them...
Vol. 2 • July 1997 • No. 42
