Customer Reviews

FAMILY ARSENAL

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Theroux has always been an unflinching narrator on human nature. With a novel like Mosquito Coast he gave you a look at the mind of a genius and his estrangement to materialism. With The Family Arsenal, Theroux gives you a look at the close knit troubles of family life in the slums of London, and the frightening results of sudden violence that can arrupt at any moment. A haunting portrait of a society on the downward trend towards hell on earth.

Charles Dicken's grim London is mashed up with Antonioni's mod London and Graham Greene's moody tone in this tale of a young American Foreign Service dropout escaping the United States-Viet Nam war who crashes in a London slum with a small band of half-hearted hipster/Irish revolutionaries.

His depictions of London are vivid and I found myself checking Wikipedia to compare his descriptions of each neighborhood against the reality, and I found that even with the passage of 35 years, his descriptions hold true. This is evidence of Theroux's keen eye as a travel writer.

The tone is an attempt at both moody sentimentality and social satire.

One sees the author modelling himself as a resourceful tough guy in the hero.

Other than the hero, the characters and situations are drawn somewhat thinly. Depictions of sexual longing and sexual situations in general seem most well-drawn and realistic.

The whole story doesn't quite hold together. 5 or 6 characters are drawn together from different parts of London in an excessive amount of meet-cute.

The denouement is rather tidy.

I won't describe the whole plot out of respect for Theroux initiates who will enjoy the writing on a page-by-page basis, as I did, without necessarily admiring the whole.

Also be warned that there are pages of flights of fancy every 10 pages or so that are somewhat tedious to plow through.

The author is at his best in depicting sexual situations and action situations. The passages depicting character's inner motivations are generally rather tedious, and many character stereotypes are invoked.

The politics of the novel are not the main driving force of the story, which is character driven. While the scaffolding has a lot of politics in it, overall the politics are completely irrelevant, because the story is centrally about the feelings and sense of isolation of the main character.

The novel was written in 1975, when the author was 34 or so, and this relative youth may account for some of the stereotyping and the thin-ness of the characters.

Not a bad read but he's done better and is at his best in his travel writing and when he is more directly writing about versions of himself. This is because the author is a reflective and entertaining narcissist and so writes more deeply when he is writing directly about himself.

Without question, Paul Theroux has been among our most astute observers of human nature writing in the English language. In "The Family Arsenal", a terse, compelling look at crime in London's slums, Paul Theroux takes an unflinching, often brutal, look at the interplay between adverse poverty and crime. Furthermore he adds to this compelling mixture an intriguing look at IRA terrorism being waged on the streets of London. All of this is told through vivid, well-crafted prose. Fans of Paul Theroux's work will not be disappointed with his latest fictional excursion into an abyss of contemporary Western society.

Theroux is reprising Conrad's Secret Agent. The hero, Valentine Hood, is originally a US Consul in VietNam, but quits in disgust after punching a leading Vietnamese politician for saying "These people aren't worth it." Hood is hiding in London, trying to get in with the Irish Provos to bring down the 'Establishment.' The ultimate explosion and shooting deaths destroy only anarchists and their materiel. That sketch is essentially Conrad's Secret Agent as well, but Conrad's story held nothing but stupidity and pointless scheming. The world is hopeless, and the only thing worse than the establishment running it is the nincompoops trying to destroy it. Theroux, on the other hand, offers some hope, based on the family unit, and on normal people who can tell the difference between struggling to make life better, vs. just blabbing about it.
Theroux makes no secret of his take on the Secret Agent; he mentions it explicitly several times, and refers to characters from it an additional few times. Theroux's plot is as full of impossible coincidences as A Midsummer Night's Dream, but he doesn't pretend to be serious about that part.. it's very entertaining to watch him weave all the characters together in one big net.
My personal choice of sentence quotes: "Sex, an expression of freedom, made you less free: the penalty of freedom was a reverie of loneliness." The warmth and feeling of "family" are woven throughout the book.