Never go back

Doctor Livingstone is said to have found the swamps of Elephant Marsh impenetrable. Ellis Hock has no such trouble. A long flight, hired car and motorcycle taxi carry the kindly American across the Malawian hinterland, where the Shire river feeds the Zambezi at its border with Mozambique. Lured by the ‘green glow’ of memory, Hock returns gratefully to the cluster of mud huts where, in the bright dawn of Independence, he spent four years as a graduate volunteer in the US Peace Corps.

Now 62, every day of Hock’s adult life — as the nattily dressed owner of a menswear store in small-town Massachussetts — has been freighted with nostalgia. He recalls the local language, Sena. He remembers a capacity for happiness, an idea of the future. But prospects have receded. The school house which Hock once helped to build has become a refuge for witchdoctors and snakes. His consignment of textbooks is redundant. So too are the Bible and Shakespeare, those desert-island staples which the younger Hock impressed upon his students.

Malabo in the 21st century is a republic of thieves. ‘When your money is gone, they will eat you,’ warns Gala, the stooped and toothless former schoolteacher that Hock once dreamed of marrying. Like a frog simmering to death in a slowly heated pan, he ignores her advice to escape while he can. A dwindling stash of kwacha notes postpones his fate at the hands of the scheming chief Manyenga. Only the loyalty of Zizi, Gala’s granddaughter, sustains him. A flat-footed virgin angel, she unwraps her chitenje to dance naked as Hock gasps with malarial fever.

Where Hock is disorientated, Paul Theroux is confidently at home. The depredations of the village are a theme to which he has returned, sporadically, in both novels and non-fiction — most recently in his 2008 travelogue Dark Star Safari.