The Lower River [Hardcover]

Paul Theroux (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 22, 2012

Ellis Hock never believed that he would return to Africa. He runs an old-fashioned menswear store in a small town in Massachusetts but still dreams of his Eden, the four years he spent in Malawi with the Peace Corps, cut short when he had to return to take over the family business. When his wife leaves him, and he is on his own, he realizes that there is one place for him to go: back to his village in Malawi, on the remote Lower River, where he can be happy again.

Arriving at the dusty village, he finds it transformed: the school he built is a ruin, the church and clinic are gone, and poverty and apathy have set in among the people. They remember him—the White Man with no fear of snakes—and welcome him. But is his new life, his journey back, an escape or a trap?

Interweaving memory and desire, hope and despair, salvation and damnation, this is a hypnotic, compelling, and brilliant return to a terrain about which no one has ever written better than Theroux.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"What we have finally is a relentless tale of suspense adroitly presented. Theroux’s practiced hand in the matter of dialogue and scene-making is strongly in evidence. No one will nod off reading The Lower River...It’s a particular kind of frightening fun to watch evil flexing and spreading its leathery wings, and really feel it. The Lower River gives the reader just that." -- The New York Review of Books

  " ‘The Lower River’ is riveting in its storytelling and provocative in its depiction of this African backwater, infusing both with undertones of slavery and cannibalism, savagery and disease. Theroux exposes paternalism in Hock’s Peace Corps nostalgia, his ‘sense of responsibility, almost a conceit of ownership.’ That sense of responsibility, and Hock’s modest contribution to the welfare of a people he was once genuinely fond of, has been replaced by a harsher mode of operation, run by coldhearted contractors living apart in impregnable compounds. ‘I have to leave,’ Hock pleads. ‘I’m going home.’ To which the village headman replies, with chilling menace, ‘This is your home, father.’ " -- New York Times Book Review

"In this hypnotically compelling fiction, [Theroux] wrestles with questions of good intentions and harsh reality...A gripping and vital novel that reads like Conrad or Greene—in short, a classic." -- Booklist, starred

 

 

"Theroux successfully grafts keen observations about the efficacy of international aid and the nature of nostalgia to a swift-moving narrative through a beautifully described landscape." -- PW, starred

 

 

"Extraordinary...The suspense is enriched by Theroux’s loving attention to local customs and his subversive insights...Theroux has recaptured the sweep and density of his 1981 masterpiece The Mosquito Coast. That’s some achievement." -- Kirkus, starred

 

 

"Theroux's latest can be read as straight-up suspense, but those unafraid of following him into the heart of darkness will be rewarded with much to discuss in this angry, ironic depiction of misguided philanthropy in a country dense with natural resources yet unable to feed its people." -- Library Journal

About the Author

PAUL THEROUX is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include The Lower River and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (May 22, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0547746504
• ISBN-13: 978-0547746500
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (107 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #191,703 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Paul Theroux's highly acclaimed novels include Blinding Light, Hotel Honolulu, My Other Life, Kowloon Tong, and The Mosquito Coast. His renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Dark Star Safari, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, and The Happy Isles of Oceania. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

87 of 88 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Unforgettable March 22, 2012

By M. Feldman TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

As a young man in the 1960's, the writer Paul Theroux joined the Peace Corps and taught school in a village in Malawi, then a British colony. Decades later, as part of the north-south journey through Africa chronicled in his "Dark Star Safari," he returns to this village, only to find the school he built fallen into disrepair and the villagers dependent on aid from western charities.

This bit of biography is the basis of the story of "The Lower River," a novel that is a riveting adventure story, a meditation on what constitutes happiness, and a satirical skewering of the culture of dependency fostered by well-meant philanthropy. It is the tale of Ellis Hock, a man in his sixties who, unhappy in his own life, decides to return to the village in Malawi where he had been happy once, long ago. Like many of Theroux's characters, Hock has a bit of Theroux's own life attached to him; he owns a store in Medford, Massachusetts, where Theroux grew up, and inhabits, post-divorce, a condo in a building that once served as Medford High School.

Ellis Hock may resemble Paul Theroux in some of the details, but he is decidedly not the acerbic writer himself. Hock is touching and vulnerable in his sadness and in his optimism that happiness can be found in a place. In his return to Malabo, the village where he had been a teacher, he equips himself with everything he will need: clothes, a sturdy bag, plenty of money, a few essential contacts, and photocopies of his passport. He reaches the remote village intent on doing good. Instead, he finds himself at the center of a set of circumstances that reads like a thriller, complete with complex plots and near-escapes.

So fine and so compelling is this novel (and yes, it's the kind that demands to be picked up repeatedly until you are done reading it) that I am reluctant to say much more about the plot. So know that this is a story full of illusions, lies and brilliant detail. There is the NGO "Agence Anonyme," with its food donations and celebrity visits; there is the village composed entirely of and ruled by children, whose parents have been lost to "eddsi" (AIDS). The false humility of Manyenga, the village chief, may put you in mind of a character from Conrad. In fact, you'll have to decide for yourself how much has changed--or if anything has changed at all--since Conrad's own journey up the Congo river more than 120 years ago, the journey that was the basis of "Heart of Darkness."

M. Feldman

40 of 41 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "The truth is absent here." March 25, 2012

By Jill I. Shtulman TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Anyone who has read Paul Theroux knows one of his key themes is the American innocent abroad, refusing to acknowledge the dark side of the people he encounters...or himself. In many of his past novels, his characters are transplanted into a new culture and struggle to survive against environmental, cultural and psychological pressures.

For those who enjoy Theroux, his latest novel does not disappoint. In fact, it soars.

Once again, we are treated to an anti-hero who is forced to meet his overblown expectations head-on. And once again there are tendrils of Theroux's own life: Ellis Hock, like Theroux himself, hails from Medford, Massachusetts and spent time in the backwaters of Malawi as a teacher during a tender age.(Theroux was actually dismissed from the Peace Corps for becoming involved in Malawi's politics).

Now, forty years later, Hock's business and marriage have failed, his daughter has revealed her avarice, and he decides to return to The Lower River - the poorest part of a poor country and home of the superstitious Sena people.

The ensuing tale - a tale of salvation and damnation, evocative of Heart of Darkness or Lord of the Flies - is downright hypnotic. Hock is known as the man who handles snakes in a village that fears them; this tale, too, grips around the reader, holding tight, not letting go. Hock "did not want to think that Africa was hopeless." But in reality, "the school would remain a roofless shell, a nest of snake, the office a hideout for the orphan boys, the clinic a ruin."

The plot twists are so intriguing that I don't even want to allude to them; suffice to say that Theroux delves deeply into whether a healthy interest in a different culture can coincide with the arrogance and egotism that we bring to that culture. "What do you want? I'm from America. I can get food, I can find money for you," Hock says, when placed in a potentially dangerous situation. Yet as he later discovers, "You come with money to the poor, and they are so frenzied by hunger that all they see is the money. They never see your face, and so when the money is gone, you are revealed as mere flesh: a surprise. They don't know you."

The most riveting parts of the story are the power plays between Hock and Manyenga, the cynical and sniveling village chief, who oppresses him with meaningless gestures of honor, baring to the core what he believes the mzungo "divinity" - the white man - is all about. There is much to mull over: "This looks such a simple place. But no, everyone lies, so you can't know it all...If you're hungry, you will do everything, you will agree to anything, you will say anything." Once more, Theroux has masterfully displayed a clash of the cultures and their false expectations.

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An electrifying moral adventure March 26, 2012

By Evelyn Getchell TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

The Lower River, an electrifying moral adventure by Paul Theroux, is by turns a riveting chronicle of human disintegration and devastatingly imaginative social critique. It grapples a contemporary truth seldom mentioned but immediately recognized, the white man's incomprehension of Black Africa.

Ellis Hock is an American "everyman," a retired mens' clothier in his sixties who - following an unpleasant divorce from his wife of many years, plus the estrangement of his adult daughter, as well as the loss of his family home - feels compelled to retreat from the society in which he was never truly happy nor to which he feels he ever really belonged.

Hock's deepest and most private desire during the past forty years of living the successful but unfulfilling American Dream in Medford, Massachusetts, has been to return to the remote village in one of the poorest and most under-developed countries in Africa, Malawi, where he was a respected and much-loved teacher for the Peace Corp. It was there during the 1960s in the village of Malabo where Hock was the happiest and most contented in his life... and it is there where he is now destined, to Malabo, the only place Ellis Hock has left to go. Hock will return to the Lower River, to "the measure of his happiness."

I am an armchair escapist greatly attracted to literary travel experiences, so Ellis Hock's journey back to the Lower River (reflecting Theroux's own experiences in Malawi) had me intensely fascinated and thoroughly engaged. No, it is more accurate to say that the impassive cruelty of Theroux's unsympathetic realism snared me, took me in its jaws, sunk its teeth into me and dragged me along with it, never releasing me until the last page and that final sentence were reached. Theroux stole my breath. He not only took me to the malarial setting of Malawi but made me feel every brutal reality that Hock was to encounter there.

THE LOWER RIVER is a hero's journey of Conradian richness - raw, exotic and intimate to read. It is rather evocative of Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey" but in a photonegative kind of way, in which the light and the dark are in inverse relation to Campbell's original model. Joe Campbell organized the hero's journey into three sections: "Departure" or the hero's adventure prior to the quest; "Initiation" or the hero's many adventures along the way; and "Return" which involves the hero's return home with knowledge acquired along the journey.

This is also the pattern of Hock's adventure but as Theroux's humid narrative penetrates deeper and deeper into the dark territory of a desperate and dangerous Malawi, Hock's journey on the Lower River leads not to a decisive victory won by the hero, with the hero returning with great power to bestow boons upon his fellow man...no, it leads to desperation, degradation, disintegration and death.

This is a novel of psychological penetration, moral perceptibility, and symbolic power. Hock, the white "everyman" is brought face to face with corruption and despair at the very heart of humanity. "He had come here as a man, with willingness and money, assured of meeting friends and...with a confidence that amounted almost to a sense of superiority." But this proves to become his tragic mistake.

Theroux's treatment of the Sena people of Malawi is realistic without being pandering. "They were not diabolical; they were desperate. But desperation made them cruel and casual."

THE LOWER RIVER is a novel of character complexity with strong undercurrents of social issues. Hock says: "As soon as I arrived the other day, I felt rejuvenated, as I had when I first came here. It's strange the power a white person feels in Africa. It should be the opposite, feeling like the odd man out. But no, a kind of strength is attributed to us."

Hock's self-perception, running parallel with all the white persons' assumptions about their roles in Africa, is challenged in this novel. It is a theme with the intensity of the African sun, fierce and inescapable, but above all, undeniably important. The Lower River is a gripping and haunting but relevant novel... of the most serious purpose.