The Lower River

The Lower River
by Paul Theroux

With his new novel, Paul Theroux returns to the Africa of Dark Star Safari and his early novels; but The Lower River, the story of an American who goes back to Africa where he was once happy, is in many ways even more remarkable.

Ellis Hock is a man so out of luck that even his family name is a mistake. His Italian grandfather, who set up a tailor's shop in a small town in Massachusetts, once tried to make his name more suitably American by changing it from Falcone to Hawk. But he was misunderstood, and the family had to live with Hock for ever after. The Lower River is all about being misunderstood: madly, wildly and very nearly fatally.

The sad yet bitterly funny opening chapters are a beautifully taut portrait of a man at the end of his tether. After a lifetime on duty behind the counter of Hock's Menswear – which, like its owner, is out of tune with the times – Ellis Hock's life is one day ruined. His wife discovers a cache of love-letters on his phone and decides he is a wild philanderer, when he is really just a serial emailer. Hock's private life has been not erotic but merely electronic, and exists only in the affectionate text messages he has exchanged with kindly wives of his customers over the years.

When his wife divorces him and his daughter claims her share of his money and turns her back on him, Ellis Hock flees Boston for the only place in his life where he once knew who he was: the obscure village of Malabo, in the far south of Malawi.

Malabo, as he remembers it, in what was then Nyasaland before independence, was a desolate place: malarial, appallingly hot, poor, proud, dangerous, superstitious, and infested with snakes. Fresh out of college with a biology degree, Hock went there as a young Peace Corps teacher. He helped to build a school, learnt the Sena language and fell in love with Gala, a local woman.

Like most of Hock's dreams, it did not end well. Gala was engaged to a villager and to lose her virginity would mean that her fiancé would disown her. Yet in Malabo, Hock had been in his element. He doubled his volunteer stint from two years to four, and was renowned in the village as the man who was not afraid of snakes. His reluctant return to the States – because his father was dying – has haunted him ever since.

Theroux's account of a young man's first enchanted experience of Africa, with its evident autobiographical underpinnings, rings exactly right. It is a masterly, moving portrait of how Africa ensnares and enchants and plays merry hell with sentimentalities.

Hock, who remembers so lovingly the country of Nyasaland, is utterly unprepared for what he finds there 40 years on. What he wants is to go back to "a simpler, older world", where he was called, with respect and affection, "the mzungu at Malabo". What he gets is the new Malawi, where a disenchanted official at the American consulate tells him that "everyone wants a ticket out". And where, when he arrives in Malabo, he finds the school, the store and the spirit of the villagers wrecked beyond repair.