Volume 24, Number 18 · November 10, 1977
Fatal Attitudes
By Donald Davie
The Consul's File
by Paul Theroux
Houghton Mifflin, 209 pp., $8.95
The Ice Age
by Margaret Drabble
Knopf, 295 pp., $8.95
'The war did not destroy the English—it fixed them in fatal attitudes. The Japanese were destroyed and out of that destruction came different men; only the loyalties were old—the rest was new.' Thus the thirty-six-year-old New Englander Paul Theroux, pursuing his studies of the post-Imperial British, this time in Malaysia, Somerset Maugham country. The short stories in The Consul's File should be popular. How to cope, or more precisely how not to cope, with losing an empire—for an updated Somerset Maugham the subject has everything: nostalgia, pathos, irony, and (not too frequently of course, but the more tellingly) gusts of delicious guilt and right-thinking anticolonialism. Even the appropriate tone, scenario, and idiom are common stock—credits to Graham Greene. Given these advantages, an adroit practitioner like Paul Theroux could hardly go wrong. Nor does he; The Consul's File can be recommended as a thoroughly good read. And yet it is, or it ought to be, intolerably depressing. Near the end the narrator, an American winding up an unnecessary consulate in an unimportant town, sums up about Malaysia:
Review, 2748 words
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