Pale Greene
Lewis Jones
Doctor Slaughter Paul Theroux (Hamish Hamilton £6.95) There is as much in the way of tourism in Paul Theroux's fiction as in his books about long railway journeys. Along the iron rails of that reliable and agreeable legacy of the 19th century, the convention" al narrative, he has steamed around the world, to the Far East, Africa, South America and Europe. His heroes are American expatriates – research students, teachers and diplomats, pimps – drawn by romance and distracted by the sordid. Theroux's theme is the relationship of the two, and his master is Graham Greene.. This discipleship is most evident in Plc- tore Palace (1978), in which Greene makes an appearance. The novel is about MOO Coffin Pratt, an elderly American photo' grapher, who intends Greene to be her final subject. He takes her out to dinner, reminisces about travel and tarts and per- suades her to abandon photography °f autobiography. He inspires the nove then, and doing so says something that stands as Theroux's artistic credo: 'Greene said, "Only the outsider sees. You have to be a stranger to write about any situa- tion." ' Doctor Slaughter, Theroux's latest novel, is an examination of this credo. It t5 about Lauren Slaughter (née Mopsy Fair- light), who has come to London to d° research on the Arabs at the 'Hemisphere. Institute of International Studies': 'At WI Lauren has liked being new to London and not knowing a soul. Being a stranger was a thrill, like being in disguise – full of those possibilities. And she believed that stran- gers were among the few people in the world who could be trusted with the truth. She loved telling them her secrets, and discovering theirs.' Lauren is beautiful and healthy (she is a Jogger and food faddist) but she is poor. She has to live in a bedsit in Coldharbour Lane, Brixton – in hateful contrast to Mayfair, where she studies. To protect herself against the English weather she has her raincoat lined with her mother's old mink; unable to pay the tailor, she allows him to take photographs of her neck. When her lavatory freezes, she pays the plumber with fellatio. Her circumstances and attitude make her unusually receptive to a videotape, sent to her anonymously, of a documentary about the Jasmine Escort Agency, Shepherd's Market, which is a front for prostitution: 'Lauren was struck by how plain they were, how little conversation they had: their accents were uneducated and their health was mediocre; they had bad skin and wore too much make-up. They had heavy legs. They smoked. They were dogmeat.' Confident of her superiority, Lauren visits the Jasmine Escort Agency and, with the help of Madame Cybele, Captain Twilley and an Arab called Karim, she is soon a successful tart, with a flat in Half Moon Street. She specialises in Arabs, with whom she can converse easily on economic matters and from whom she learns much of value to her academic work. She is also a favourite of Sam Bulbeck, a Labour life peer who is in- volved in Middle East peace talks.
Lauren enjoys her double life as student and tart: 'She was two people'. But after a time she ceases to be a stranger and learns that she is not a free agent, harmlessly exploiting the exploiters, but the bait in a complicated political trap. The novel ends with her removal to France, where she discovers the true nature of her private life on the front pages of the newspapers.
Like Theroux's earlier London fiction The Family Arsenal (1976) and the short story collections, World's End (1980) and The London Embassy (1982) – Doctor Slaughter is full of the peevish observations of the tourist, about smelly phone boxes and so on. The most irritating thing, of course, is the locals: . . some of these English people could look much older than they were, wearing incredibly ugly clothes and with terrible posture, and there were thirty-year-olds in London who had grey hair.' It is interesting to see one's country through a tourist's eyes and delightful to pounce on inaccuracies ('We're through with Chamonix,' says a toff); but Mr Theroux has lived here for some time now, and his observations are not as fresh as they were. More interesting, perhaps, is his treatment of prostitution and its 'small hot secrets' — the sexual equivalent of tourism. But Doctor Slaughter is clearly intended as something more than a fictional Baedek- er. Though there are other discernible influences on the novel ('Why did the French seem to take such pleasure in giving a person bad news?' seems straight out of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), the strongest, one is tempted to call it the overpowering influence is again that of Greene. The title, the brevity (137 pages) and even the book's jacket (with its absence of biographical detail and its talk of 'an entertainment of a very high calibre') invite comparison with Doctor Fischer of Geneva, that perverse allegory of greed. So, to an extent, does the plot: the story opens at a dinner party, where a sinister and ugly man called van Arkady appals and thrills Lauren with the announcement that there are only five thousand people in the world, arguing that to speak of a million dead is to enter the realm of metaphor; we meet him again at the end of the novel and learn that he has been controlling Lauren all along. Like Doctor Fischer, Doctor Slaughter is a realistic fairy tale about pleasure and power, the personal and the public. As might be expected, Theroux is not flattered by the comparison: the detail of his novel is not so telling; the spareness of the narra- tive, lacking the resonance of Greene's, begins to look like thinness. Leaving the invited comparison aside, Doctor Slaughter is a highly accomplished and sometimes amusing exercise; taking it into account, it is best seen as a tribute to a great master.
Previous page
