The Bad Angel Brothers

Paul Theroux

Hamish Hamilton, £20

 

BY ROSEMARY GORING

 

These dolorous days Paul Theroux, now in his ninth decade, is better known as the father of TV personality Louis than as the author of a catalogue of compelling novels and pungent travel books.

By chance, ahead of publication of his latest novel, I reread one of the latter. Dark Star Safari (2002) is an account of a journey he made from Cairo to Cape Town. “All news out of Africa is bad,” it opens ominously, before declaring that the trip turned out to be both “a delight and a revelation”.

This is vintage Theroux; unsentimental, surprising, bracingly honest, never other than true to himself. For instance, underwhelmed by the efficacy of NGAs, he writes: “I began to understand the futility of charity in Africa ... Aliens had been helping for so long and were so deeply entrenched that Africans lost interest – if indeed they had ever had it – in doing the same sort of work themselves. Not only was there no spirit of volunteerism, there was not even a remote desire to replace aid workers in paying jobs.”

I recalled this passage when reading The Bad Angel Brothers. As is often the case with Theroux, part of the action is set in Africa. Its narrator – the word “hero” is rarely apposite in a Therovian context – Pascal “Cal” Belanger, like his creator, has a hankering to disappear, to switch off. The vast continent is a place of escape.

But Cal is not a traveller or on the run. He is a geologist and prospector who, while in Zambia, found high-quality emeralds. Consequently, he is away from home for months at a time and the distance between him and his wife Vita grows wider with each absence.

As he records: “I made the mistake of the committed – the single-minded, the selfish – traveller, who regards travel as a mission. I stopped coming all the way back.”

We can be forgiven, then, for assuming that Cal and Theroux have more than a little in common. But Cal is only one of the two Belanger brothers. The other is called Frank who, by Cal’s testimony, is one truly bad angel. “He was not a person, he was a problem ...” Frank is a lawyer who is adept at making up stories, none of which is true. One, for example, involved him being “brutally murdered in Florida by a drug gang” and his passport stolen by the man who had been killed.

All of this was fantasy. A serial liar and sociopath, Frank is as adept at playing his brother as he is the gullible natives of their New England birthplace of Littleford. For Cal, Frank is “a high-functioning asshole”. That they don’t see eye to eye is to underestimate their mutual loathing.

Nevertheless, when Frank asks Cal to help him out financially after his marriage implodes he agrees. Both men are now in their 50s. Cal seems to be on the up while Frank is heading in the opposite direction.

But after this altruistic gesture the tables begin to turn and Cal’s fortunes decline while Frank’s soar. Like Saul Goodman in Better Call Saul, Frank is a brilliant shyster who spouts legal jargon and can bend the law to suit his own nefarious ends.

That it is his own brother who is one of the worst victims of his venality makes him especially malevolent.

No-one turns a screw better than Theroux. As a reader, one winces at Cal’s innocence, his self-destructing hesitancy to call out Frank.

Their encounters usually take place in the Littleford Diner where Frank toys with his chowder and doesn’t make eye contact. For him, sibling rivalry is taken to extremes; he doesn’t want to best his brother, he wants to bring him down, to humiliate him. Quite why he wants to do this is not entirely clear.

“Although he made a convincing enough pretence of being my friend,” Cal recalls, “I knew he didn’t like me.” For his epigraph, Theroux quotes from Joyce’s Ulysses: “A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.”

Over the course of a few years and a number of unsatisfactory lunches there is a steady and pernicious transferral of power and wealth. Cal’s marriage crumbles, he is estranged from his wife and son (who are both enchanted by Frank), has his bank account drained and is forced to return to live with his mother in the house he thinks he owns. That, too, he will lose. And he leaves Africa and with it his lover.

Unlike Frank’s life, Cal’s seems “plotless and wayward”. The never-ending quest for precious metals – gold, cobalt, industrial diamonds – leads him to encounters with scary people in inhospitable places.

“Out of touch, on my own, surrounded by fractured rock, and scrub and sand, in a valley as hot and bleak as a crucible,” he writes, “I began to understand who I was and what I wanted. No-one interrupted me or asked me questions. I lived without pretension. I was an animal in a purified state of utter solitude.” Above all, Frank was nowhere to be seen.

Gradually, Cal comes to his senses, though it may be too late to repair the damage done to him by his brother. He harbours violent thoughts and, as the novel reaches a crescendo, he must decide how to act on them. He seems a reliable narrator, but is he?

One has doubts but puts them aside. Along the way there is much to ponder and enjoy. At his best – and this novel is not far from it – Theroux writes in a manner most contemporary authors can only dream of. One senses the shades of Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham and VS Naipaul hovering in the ether, all of whom sought inspiration far from madding crowds and so-called civilization.

The irony is that by finding cobalt – without which the world we have come to know would collapse – Cal is helping to sustain a way of life he disdains.