Fiction: Sex is power and lust is dangerous, as is obvious from this stylish, almost viciously honest collection of tales sinister. Paul Theroux has always been a writer of immense sophistication and diversity. Cool, detached and elegantly brutal, his America hovers somewhere between Europe and home while never ceasing to yearn for the Africa he discovered in his youth, writes Eileen Battersby.
Curiously, though, as a novelist and short story writer, he has always been overshadowed by the enduring presence of his classic travel books, The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) and The Old Patagonian Express (1979), which were credited with reinvigorating the travel writing genre just prior to the emergence of Bruce Chatwin. At its best, Theroux's fiction stands somewhere between Greene and Maugham, with flashes of Patrick White, and he is closer to this élite trio than he is to any of his fellow US writers.
For all the quasi-colonial, rather patrician tone, there is always the individual Theroux voice: sharp, intelligent, assured, solitary and - increasingly - regretful. There is a strongly autobiographical element undercut by daring and trickery. Odd, unsettling, quasi-confessional works such as My Secret History (1989) and My Other Life (1996) leave the reader both excited and bewildered by the "maybe it's true, but perhaps it's not" quality. There is also the offbeat funny, belatedly likeable Theroux personae, narrator of an entertaining romp of romps, Hotel Honolulu (2001).
It has been a career of twists and turns and several lives, consistency and frequent brilliance, such as Picture Palace (1978). Born in 1941, Theroux appears to have travelled most of the world in his life and through his imagination. His fiction is sustained by an essential restlessness. Increasingly, mortality and memory are taking over. Both dominate the title story, which could be seen as a gesture to Maugham. It is a good story, horrible and compelling. Its genius lies in Theroux's black manipulation of the cyclical savagery of youth and age.
"This is my only story," begins the calm, deliberate narrator. "Now that I am 60, I can tell it."
He is an artist, who says: "The world knows me as a hero. My paintings are like good deeds." Looking back to his youth and the time he travelled in Italy and Sicily, the story describes a young man with nothing except his talent, his youth and an opportunistic sense of adventure.
In a neat variation of Henry James, the narrator, clearly no innocent and on the run from the romantic needs of a girl intent on real love, is drawn into a complex sexual intrigue with a glamorous older woman and her male companion. He meets them in a Sicilian resort hotel. At first, he observes them as if they were figures in a painting and is conscious of thinking as he looks at them: "I want your life."
His interest is returned. He is quickly assessed as a useful player. Once he accepts the rules, the young man is provided with a hotel room, clothes and pocket money. He is even entrusted with little errands to be fetched for the countess, "the Gräfin", a bizarre creature with no manners and an obsessive interest in her beauty. Powerful and pathetic, she affects a detached contempt that acts as a form of seduction. It is a chilling tale. The narrator describes both the frantic sex and the shared hatred that feed off each other.
The twist is pure Maugham. To contrast with the choreographed European affair conducted between servant and master, with each exchanging roles, the narrator meets a new woman, Myra, a young American tourist. Of course, she is everything the countess is not and, on meeting the older woman, Myra quickly assesses the narrator's function. This realisation is well-described:
"There was a cloud on her face, a sort of resignation and quiet anger that might have been rueful," the narrator recalls. "I saw at that moment of witnessing the Gräfin poke me Myra had written me off as someone she could not rely on. She had summed up the situation before I said a word."
Exit Myra.
The Mediterranean setting is well-evoked; Theroux has always had immense feel for the smell, the light, the atmosphere of a place and, most of all, the inertia. It is not a love story, but rather an account of how each has their turn, and then the roles change.
Elsewhere, 'Boyhood Secrets' is part of a triptych of sorts, featuring three stories involving dramatic rites of passage for a young boy. In the first, the boy, Andy, hovers between innocence and curiosity, courtesy of the girl next door, while the second sees our hero banished when he accidentally discovers his pal's mother moments after having sex with a stranger.
She never forgives the boy: "I was a bad influence for what I knew: that naked people are strong, weak people make jokes, say nothing and you have secrets."
It is as sharply written as anything Theroux does, but the strength of the trio is the third, 'Scouting for Boys'. Revenge as well as a disturbingly accurate sense of sexual confusion drive this powerful narrative.
Three boys, all scouts, become involved in a hunt through the local woods. The quarry is the man who sexually abused one of them. The search ends in an appalling discovery. The sexuality of the boys is juxtaposed with the natural forest setting in which their quest takes place.
Even more impressive, and the most adroit performance in the collection, is 'An African Story', in which the narrator recalls the fall of a white South African writer, whose fiction always drew on the surreal and whose life became even stranger. Again, sex is at the root of the tale. The writer begins an affair with a one-armed black schoolteacher. She seems passive and willing, but the roles and the rules change quickly. In the teacher, a woman whom the writer likens to "a character in one of his strangest stories", lies his ruination. Events spin on the power shifts. Soon the writer is struck by "the sense of living inside one of his own stories".
Finally, there is the comic yarn about a bored man who lives in his big house, which is cleaned by an attractive mother and daughter team. Always excited by the sight of women at work, the wealthy old lawyer becomes obsessed with the pair to the point of following them when they set off on their regular Las Vegas holiday. It is funny, if somewhat slight, after the darkness of the other stories.
There is no place for romance in this candid, unforgiving book. Theroux is exploring power, and delusion and loss, in an area of life in which there is no justice.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro. By Paul Theroux, Hamish Hamilton, 247pp, £14.99