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the complete review - fiction

Blinding Light

by
Paul Theroux

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : well-told, but loses its way (or at least its energy) by the end

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Varying degrees of enthusiasm, with no one thinking he really pulls it off

  From the Reviews:

• "A journeyman editor would have cut out the repetitions, quotations, boasting, name-dropping, purple passages, dreams, hallucinations, score-settling, bombast and sex fantasies. He would have seen if there were a novel in here." - James Buchan, The Guardian
  
  
• "In a sense, whether you will enjoy this novel depends on whether you share its author's erotic interests. It has not always, but often, been thus with Paul Theroux." - Julian Evans, The Independent
  
  
• "While the plot surges onwards with Steadman's hubristically defiant return to public life and personal calamity, any thematic coherence begins to falter. Looping ideas of possession, trespass, deceit and sight amount to little more than continuity links in the narrative. Steadman's shamanic mind-reading ability while drugged demands too much suspense of disbelief in an otherwise grittily naturalistic work." - James Urquhart, Independent on Sunday
  
  
• "(A) shrewd and cunning novel full of malleable personalities, psychedelia and considerable sex. What more could a reader ask for ? (...) Theroux maintains tight control over his novel's twists and turns, although there's a bit too much of both near the end. Still, his very funny accounts of the publishing industry, the travel writing phenomenon and life on Martha's Vineyard -- in short, elements of his own life -- ring clear and true." - Tom Miller, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "Underneath the naturalism, this book stands in a tradition far more ancient than the novel, in which the journey of the central character is exemplary, an illustration of the consequences of right and wrong action." - Hari Kunzru, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Though Theroux's own output is somewhere between prolific and prodigal, he convincingly inhabits a writer at the opposite end of the productivity spectrum, and an example of an increasingly common character type, the embittered success -- Midas with a leaden scowl. (...) Theroux is better here on place than person" - Adam Mars-Jones, The Observer
  
  
• "In any case, pleasure -- especially the sexual and mind-altering varieties -- cannot go unpunished forever. Despite all his trips abroad, Theroux is an American writer who knows all too well this nation's love-hate relationship with feeling good. With that in mind, readers might anticipate the unraveling of Steadman's Faustian bargain." - Stephen J. Lyons, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "The best bits of Blinding Light -- and these are very good indeed -- cover the irritations of the Ecuador trip and the finale, in which Steadman finds himself stalked by a German datura-sampler who ‘knows his secret’. The bonking sessions, on the other hand, are almost Wagnerian in their portentousness and will be shortly leaving this desk for the welcoming embrace of the Literary Review Bad Sex award." - D.J.Taylor, The Spectator
  
  
• "Although written with his familiar fluency, and with occasional flashes of considerable power, Blinding Light is overlong, self-indulgent and finally unconvincing." - Tom Deveson, Sunday Times
  
  
• "Much of the book has -- quite intentionally -- the quality of a trance. Unfortunately, it's a very long and meandering trance in which Theroux's purpose becomes increasingly hard to discern. (...) All this makes for a maddeningly uneven whole in which wonderfully descriptive passages sit alongside unreined digressions and surprisingly clichéd characters" - John Preston, The Telegraph
  
  
• "This is a novel that -- as its title suggests -- works on binary oppositions: blindness and sight; doctor and patient; seducer and seduced; mental and physical trespass. Parallels and contrasts are rather lumberingly made. (...) Theroux's desire to say something profound seems to have overtaken his undoubted skills as a reporter both of the actual and of the imagined; the story is tugged awkwardly towards allegory. His need to insist damages his prose, too." - Sam Leith, The Telegraph
  
  
• "Theroux is a gifted writer, and there are many memorable passages and much deft description here, but, as a whole, the novel is uneven. The first half of the book is better than the second, and the brief conclusion, with several strands of the plot left hanging, dispels much of the narrative momntum established earlier in the novel." - Stephen Burn, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "This overgenerous set-up robs the book of any tension, moral or narrative. But the drug's beneficial effects allow Theroux to indulge in a number of set pieces. (...) Blinding Light is less a fully realized novel than a collection of prejudices, about politics and passion. It is also an unembarrassed declaration of addiction to the art of writing, a pledge of allegiance to a fickle muse." - Peter D. Kramer, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Blinding Light tells the story of writer Slade Steadman. Decades ago he had published a book that had become a phenomenon, Trespassing, in which he recounted his adventures travelling around the globe without a passport (or practically anything else), stealing across borders: travel in its purest, freest form, completely disregarding bureaucracy. He had made good money and a fine reputation with it, but he made a fortune off the licensing: the Trespassing-brand, featuring many high-end and limited edition travel-related products, was a market leader, the products ubiquitous among rich, Western travellers.
       The novel opens with Steadman travelling to Ecuador with his girlfriend, a doctor named Ava Katsina. They have actually split up at this point, but because they booked the expedition long beforehand didn't want a ticket to go to waste and travelled together. The journey is a drug-trip: they will go to the Ecuadorean hinterlands to partake in a local ritual.
       More than anything, Steadman is looking for inspiration. He wants to be a writer again, though since his first book all he's managed is to sell articles to travel magazines and the like. The book he wants to write has eluded him (and his financial position has made it easy for him to continue pushing it into the future).
       The trip doesn't begin well: in best cranky-traveller fashion, Theroux derides the other travellers. One has Steadman's book, several are outfitted in Trespassing-gear, and they're an obnoxious, boorish bunch. Steadman thinks that once in Ecuador everyone will go their separate ways, but, of course, there's no such thing as unique experience anymore: it turns out they're all booked on the same tour as him.
       They're tiresome travellers, too, and seem to almost revel in their disappointment in and abhorrence of what they see and experience:

     Conversation for them, Steadman saw, was returning again and again to a subject and harping in monotonous repetition on trivialities. He had heard this same banter several times already, in the van, at Lago Agrio, at Papallacta, at the village.
     "Kenya's a fucking zoo," Hack said. "India's a total dump. China sucks big-time. Egypt's all ragheads. Japan's a parking lot. Want a sex tour ? Go to Thailand ? Want to get robbed by a Gypsy ? Go to Italy. Want a truly shitty experience among dirtbags ? Come here."

I mean the whole point of this book is that you can test your limits without putting crap like that in your system.

He was obsessed with writing the one book that would say everything about him, disclose all his secrets. He would have to call it a novel, because the names would be changed, but the rest, the masquerade of fiction, would be true, for a man in a mask is most himself.

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Links:

• Houghton Mifflin publicity page

• Barcelona Review
• Boston Magazine
• The Guardian
• Just Another Monkey ...
• Kirkus Reviews
• Neel Mukherjee
• The New York Times Book Review
• nthposition
• The Observer
• The Onion
• Peace Corps Writers
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Seattle Times
• The Washington Post
• World Hum

• Official site
• Interview in The Observer
• Interview at Powells.com

• The Bad Angel Brothers
• Burma Sahib
• Dark Star Safari
• A Dead Hand
• The Elephanta Suite
• Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
• Hotel Honolulu
• The Lower River
• Mother Land
• Sir Vidia's Shadow
• The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro
• Under the Wave at Waimea

• See Index of Contemporary American fiction

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About the Author:

       American author Paul Theroux has written almost two dozen novels and a number of excellent travel books, the most famous being The Great Railway Bazaar. He has taught in Uganda and Singapore, and he lived in England for a long time. Several of his books have been filmed (including The Mosquito Coast) and a TV series was made of his stories, The London Embassy and The Consul's Files.

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© 2005-2024 the complete review

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