The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux Paperback Book

Description: The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilisation and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured, messianic genius keeps them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable darkness. FORMAT Paperback CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description The Mosquito Coast - winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize - is a breathtaking novel about fanaticism and a futile search for utopia from bestseller Paul Theroux.Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilisation and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured, messianic genius keeps them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable darkness.Stunning. . . exciting, intelligent, meticulously realised, artful Victoria Glendinning, Sunday TimesAn epic of paranoid obsession that swirls the reader headlong to deposit him on a black mudbank of horror Christopher Wordsworth, GuardianMagnificently stimulating and exciting Anthony BurgessAmerican travel writer Paul Theroux is known for the rich descriptions of people and places that is often streaked with his distinctive sense of irony; his novels and collected short stories, My Other Life, The Collected Stories, My Secret History, The Lower River, The Stranger at the Palazzo dOro, A Dead Hand, Millroy the Magician, The Elephanta Suite, Saint Jack, The Consuls File, The Family Arsenal, and his works of non-fiction, including the iconic The Great Railway Bazaar are available from Penguin. Notes Reissue. Author Biography Paul Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts in 1941. He has written many works of fiction and travel writing, including The Last Train to Zona Verde, Dark Star Safari, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Elephanta Suite, A Dead Hand, The Tao of Travel and The Lower River. The Mosquito Coast and Dr Slaughter have both been made into successful films. Paul Theroux divides his time between Cape Cod and the Hawaiian islands. His most recent work is Deep South, which is published by Hamish Hamilton. Kirkus UK Review Allie Fox is allergic to the whole big, bad consumerist mess that constitutes the late 20th century so he abandons modern America, dragging his family to the depths of the Honduran jungle to escape. His inventiveness and know-it-all arrogance enable him to carve out his own vision of self-sufficiency from the jungle, creating an ice-making plant to amaze the natives. He ignores the power and blind cruelty of nature, creating his own disaster while the jungle reclaims what it had lost. This won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was made into a film in 1986 by Pete Weir. (Kirkus UK) Kirkus US Review The narrator of this spirited, excessive, half-successful adventure/parable is 13-year-old Charlie Fox. But the main character is Charlies father Allie - and a character he is, in the grand (somewhat empty) tradition of eccentric, vocal, never-say die, anti-everything genius/jerks. Inventor and handyman, atheistic Bible scholar and all-around know-it-all, Allie has moved his wife and four kids (Charlies the oldest) to a farm near Northampton, Mass. But now even that rural, individualistic, home-schooling existence has gotten too polluted with plastic America. (The funny opening chapters feature Allies public outbursts against cheeseburgers and cheap imports.) So, convinced of approaching apocalypse and inspired by the Central American "savages" who are the farms cheap labor, Allie impulsively decides to quit America entirely and take up residence in the jungles of Honduras: the Fox clan, following Allie with blind faith and leaving everything behind, is soon on a banana-boat out of Baltimore, heading south. All this, of course, is the stuff of boys-book adventure or Swiss Family Robinson; and the gut excitement of traveling-light-to-nowhere (also recalling Therouxs train-trip books) propels the novels first half along fiercely - even though the expedition is grim at nearly every turn, even though Allies super-feats along the way (putting the ship on even keel, doing 75 pushups, showing up a missionary) arent convincing enough to balance his obvious nuttiness. The first stop is a dreary coastal town full of dead dogs and vultures. Then its on, perilously, by boat to an inland "town" that Allie has bought: Jeronimo - just some "sour-smelling bushes in a overgrown clearing," with a few Zambus and Creoles for neighbors. Yet Allies dreams for Jeronimo soon come true: an efficient, clean settlement - "We had defeated the mosquitoes, tamed the river, drained the swamp" - with Allies great invention (an ammonia-powered icehouse) as its miracle-centerpiece. Can this Utopia last? Of course not. Allies paranoia and megalomania become increasingly obvious - on a trek to bring ice to the Indians (cf. Therouxs short-story, "The Imperial Icehouse"), in his murder of some creepy strangers. . . who die in the exploding icehouse as ammonia pollutes the whole area. So from then on its sheer nightmare - on the run, on the river, in mud and flood - while the children grow to hate Allie and even plot to kill him. Allie will die, in fact, but from both bullets and vultures - man and nature. And its one of the many overdrawn effects in a novel that regularly sacrifices plausibility and pacing for the bold outlining or heavy reiteration of themes: the doomed dreams of Yankee ingenuity and individualism, the inevitable intertwining of progress and danger. Still, though the presentation of the serious ideas here is more noisy and colorful than thoughtful, the storytelling itself - full of clever descriptive writing and inventive action - sustains the entertainment mightily until the thin characterizations (with their predictable transformations) run dry. And Theroux has never before so cannily combined the evocative power of his non-fiction with the zest (the comedy especially) of his best fiction. (Kirkus Reviews) Prizes Winner of James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Fiction) 1981 Winner of Yorkshire Post Book of the Year 1981 Details ISBN0140060898 Author Paul Theroux Pages 384 Publisher Penguin Books Ltd Year 1982 ISBN-10 0140060898 ISBN-13 9780140060898 Format Paperback Publication Date 1982-09-30 Imprint Penguin Books Ltd Place of Publication London Country of Publication United Kingdom Birth 1941 Media Book Edition 2nd DEWEY 813.54 Series Penguin Essentials UK Release Date 1982-09-30 Alternative 9780241973653 Audience General NZ Release Date 1982-09-29 AU Release Date 1982-09-29 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:1082703;

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