Author Paul Theroux served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi in the 1960's.
Among best-selling author Paul Theroux's 40 titles are 13 travel books, but he has never -- we hope -- taken as strange a journey as his main character in "Blinding Light."
Theroux trespasses into a strange land
June 19, 2005
Review by SUSAN HALL-BALDUF
Among best-selling author Paul Theroux's 40 titles are 13 travel books, but he has never -- we hope -- taken as strange a journey as his main character in "Blinding Light."
Slade Steadman is also a travel writer, but he has only written one book; its phenomenal success came as a fluke. "Trespassing" told the story of his trip around the world by sneaking, bribing and bluffing his way across borders without a passport. It was an adventure that included escaping from jails and fording rivers, and it captured the public's imagination so much that it became a movie, a TV series and a line of clothing and travel gear under the name Trespassing Overland Gear.
Steadman is amused to note the TOG logo all over his fellow passengers on the plane he hopes will fly him back into success. "Trespassing" was published 20 years ago; though it made him fabulously wealthy, he has been trying for two decades to write what he is sure will be his masterwork, a novel the likes of which no one has ever written before.
Meanwhile, here he sits on a plane to Ecuador with his disaffected ex-girlfriend, Dr. Ava Katsina, and a quartet of pretentious rubes wearing the TOG logo all over them. He and Ava are headed for the Amazon jungle, where they have been promised an introduction to hallucinogenic drugs. No one has ever taken such a trip before, he is sure.
He is horrified to find out that Janey, Hack, Sabra and Wood are coming, too. They are thrill seekers -- they brag of having been to Rwanda just before the killing started. They brag of having been everywhere. Hack pronounces: "India's a total dump. China sucks, big-time. Egypt's all rag-heads. Japan's a parking lot."
The Gang of Four, as they call themselves, takes an equally dim view of the journey upriver to the village where they were supposed to get excitingly stoned.
The village sucks: The people are weird, there's no place to sleep, the food is bizarre and atrocious. Call this a vacation?
For Steadman, though, the trip is a revelation.
Here he is on the river, blindfolded as they all are: "One swirl of river sloshing beside the bow Steadman took to be a fleeing snake, uncoiling in the stream. The air was humid against his face. In the shadows of trees at the level of the knobby roots were jaguars and ocelots. Sunlight glinted on the water like slivers of scrap metal. ..."
Pretty descriptive for a fellow in a blindfold, eh? Wait till he really goes blind.
For one of the plants, offered only to Steadman and German botanist Manfred Steiger (traveling solo), makes the user blind but incredibly perceptive.
Armed with plenty of roots, obtained in a dirty deal with Steiger, Steadman goes home to write his novel, a plotless swirl of insight and fantasies derived from going blind every morning and regaining his sight as the sun goes down.
Ava, intrigued by his mostly sexual fantasies, becomes his stenographer, and more. She prompts him to add details, she acts out the fantasies with him -- readers uncomfortable with explicit, unconventional carnality, be warned.
And she watches, as we do, his growing addiction to the drug and to the attention he gets as a blind man with amazing perception.
He never tells anyone else that the blindness is a temporary affectation; half the hype for his novel comes from his brave endurance of life without sight.
If they only knew, he gloats, forgetting that Steiger, wherever he is, does know.
Like Steadman, however, Theroux lets himself wallow in smugness, in the multipage insights he gives his main character into the character of the unnamed president, who is so clearly Bill Clinton it's irritating. Yes, yes, boo-hoo, we all know what a sensitive guy Clinton is, the alcoholic stepfather, blah, blah, the dirty little secret, yadda, yadda. It would be different if Theroux had Steadman nattering on about the inner depths of Richard Nixon.
Never mind, pride goeth before a fall, and readers will be gleeful in witnessing Steadman's.
And glad they have never taken a trip as dangerous and self-indulgent as this one, however entertaining.
'Blinding Light'
*** out of four stars
By Paul Theroux
Houghton Mifflin, 438 pages, $24
SUSAN HALL-BALDUF is a Free Press copy editor.
