On file and on film

Press, 30 December 1978, Page 15

On file and on film

The Consul's File. By Paul Theroux. Penguin. 202 pp. $2.50. Picture Palace. By Paul Theroux. Hamish Hamilton. 359 pp. $11.50. (Reviewed by Naylor Hillary) Ayer Itam (black water) is a straggling town in Johore, an hour’s drive north from Singapore on the main road up the Malayan peninsula. Visitors remember it, if at al], for its narrow, awkward main street lined with scruffy shops and stalls, and for the attractive pottery on sale made from local clays. Paul Theroux slipped behind the facade of Ayer Itam several years ago and produced a series of graphic short stories purporting to be the record of the town’s last American consul. He found rubber giving way to palm oil plantations, ghosts from the Japanese occupation, decaying colonial English, aggressive American anthropologists, young Chinese caught between the past and the future, and Malays still tied to the court of Johore’s sultan. “The Consul’s File” is a perceptive study of the tensions of modern Malaysia; some of its stories stand comparison with Conrad's tales

from a similar world 80 years ago. Theroux has been so successful with his recent novels, including “Saint Jack” and “The Family Arsenal,” that his readers have, perhaps, come to expect too much. “Picture Palace” is a very clever novel — too clever by half. Theroux is so determined to show his skill and ingenuity that compassion for what should have been a deeply moving subject gets lost. Maude Pratt has been a photographer for 50 years and “Picture Palace” is her reflections, prompted by the prospect of a retrospective exhibition of her work. From the days when D. H. Lawrence invited her to feel his “willie” to her last, haunting meeting with Graham Greene, she has a personal life far removed from the pictorial record she created. Yet she seems to have come alive only when watching the world through her viewfinder. Theroux fails to reconcile the two Maudes, but in a harrowing story of unrequited incestuous love he manages to capture flashes of the twentieth century through a wideangle lens Through it all, Maude remains solitary, “the first condition of a photographer.”