James Kidd
Into the Heart of Darkness
The Lower River, Paul Theroux’s twenty-seventh novel, is a story about a return. 62-year-old Ellis Hock travels to Malabo, a village in Malawi. Four decades earlier, he had chosen this tiny part of drought-ravaged Africa over conscription and the jungles of Vietnam.
The ageing Hock is moved by a different desire to escape: memories of building a school for the Sena tribe in Malabo provide a safe haven from a recent divorce and an ungrateful, money-grabbing daughter. ‘He was happy in the Lower River,’ Theroux states before upping the ante: ‘Supremely happy.’ Eventually, only a superlative will do: ‘The happiest days of his life.’ Readers need only attend to the nostalgia and the cliché to guess that Hock’s buoyancy will not last long.
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I have just spent a wonderful few minutes re-reading the best book review of the year in my opinion. It's by Piers Brendon in September's issue of @Lit_Review. Beautifully captioned as 'Jack the Lad', Brendon takes Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Vol.I apart! It's a laugh a minute. Ouch!
'Perhaps the real modern polymaths are the hidden ones who do not themselves grab the limelight but have the expertise to bring together different fields of knowledge: librarians, teachers, editors of literary journals…'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/masters-of-none
Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.