Tripping and bonking

Paul Theroux’s new novel finds Slade Steadman, the 50-year-old author of a celebrated travel book, on the trail to darkest Ecuador in the company of some deeply unpleasant American tourists and his disillusioned doctor girlfriend Ava. The object of his quest is a rare hallucinogen, shyly administered by the local shaman, with which our man hopes to end his long-standing writer’s block and get his professional life back on track. Equally irksome is a second blockage: ‘The sexual desire he had once described in starved paragraphs of solitude … as something akin to cannibal hunger was something he had not tasted for a long time.’

Whatever else may be said of Paul Theroux’s fiction, he has never run short of good ideas, and Blinding Light positively thrums with Maughamesque narrative bounce. Having sampled, and been unimpressed by, lashings of something called ayahuasca, Hack, Sabra and the other trippers are anxious to head off on the next stage of their South American tour. Steadman, meanwhile, arranges a private cocktail hour with a substance named datura. Four hours of vision-heavy slumber later, he emerges as a kind of blind savant, mercilessly probing the neuroses of his fellow travellers. A year’s supply of this potent new reality-enhancer to hand, he speeds back to his bolt-hole on Martha’s Vineyard with a moistly complaisant Ava and, sexually and imaginatively rejuvenated, starts work on a new project.

Given the focus of Steadman’s obsessions (and, it must be said, those of his creator), one had a shrewd idea what this tidal wave of creative energy might produce and, sure enough, The Book of Revelations — for such is the title of the new work — turns out to be ‘a sexual confession in the form of a novel’.