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Updated: 18 May 2003 |
Paul Theroux was born and educated in the United States. After graduating from university in 1963, he travelled first to Italy and then to Africa, where he worked as a Peace Corps teacher at a bush school in Malawi and as a lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda. In 1968 he joined the University of Singapore and taught in the English Department for three years. Throughout this time he was publishing short stories, articles, and a handful of novels.
Success, at least commercial success, did not come easily. In his biography of V.S. Naipaul, Sir Vidia’s Shadow, which is at least as revealing about the author himself, Theroux writes:
‘... I continued to worry about what was to become of me. My strategy had been to write and survive that way; my strategy was not working. A novel, a book of criticism, scores of book reviews, a collection of short stories – this in less than a year had produced such a paltry income that I was grateful to my wife for getting a job. Now I was at work on my seventh novel, and still doing journalism, and it did not seem as though I could make a living. All this in spite of burning the midnight oil and getting wonderful reviews.’
— p.201
In 1971, Theroux resigned his position at the University of Singapore to devote himself entirely to writing. He moved with his family to England, where he remained for seventeen years, writing a number of novels and commencing the series of travel books for which he is perhaps most widely noted. He has since returned to the United States, dividing his time between Hawaii and Cape Cod.
Theroux’s first book, the novel Waldo, was published in 1966. Over the next five years he published three more novels: Fong and the Indians, Girls at Play and Jungle Lovers. All three are black comedies set in Africa, and conveniently collected into one volume, On the Edge of the Great Rift.
In the years since, he has published the novels Saint Jack, The Black House, The Family Arsenal, Picture Palace, The Mosquito Coast – perhaps his most widely known title, on account of the Harrison Ford movie – O-Zone, My Secret History, Chicago Loop, Millroy the Magician and Kowloon Tong. The last of these is described by Theroux himself as a black comedy but, to my mind and despite the laughs, it easily crosses that vague line and is, in the end, utterly tragic.
He has also published four collections of short stories: Sinning With Annie, The Consul’s File, World’s End and The London Embassy; and a book of two novellas entitled Half Moon Street. He has written two books for young readers, A Christmas Card and London Show.
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Theroux is at once my favourite travel writer and yet not a travel writer at all. Paul Theroux’s ‘travel’ books – the good ones, anyway, from which I exclude The Happy Isles of Oceania – are individual, small studies of the human condition, set against the regularly changing backdrop of (usually) a train window. That is what makes Theroux’s work ‘literature’ as opposed to the work of his travel-writing colleagues, which are just simple narratives, however much I may enjoy them.
His breakthrough to commercial success followed his publication of the immensely popular The Great Railway Bazaar. This book records the author’s epic tour of Eurasia, almost entirely by train – from London via Iran and India to Vietnam (we meet some amusing characters here), then via Japan and Vladivostok onto the Trans-Siberian, westward again towards home.
For my money, his finest work by far is The Old Patagonian Express. So many fine characters: from the self-absorbed and verifiably loony Wendy to the intellectual, somehow tragic, Jorge Borges.
Theroux’s travel books include:
Theroux’s fiction includes:
He has also written the following non-fiction:
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