Paul Theroux wrote The Consul's File in 1972, no doubt drawing from his experiences teaching in Singapore in the late 60s. The stories are set in Ayer Hitam, a remote Malaysian town in the heart of a dwindling rubber and palm plantation region. I suspect he chose this area to deflect criticism of people he may have encountered in Singapore that served as models of the characters in the consul's story of people he met there. I see this novel with a central character (the stand in for the author) recounting stories of people he has met in a particular place is one that he would reuse to great effect again in Hotel Honolulu. I think this character allowed Theroux to give his impression of SE Asia at that time, for example:
He was what some people called a reactionary; he was brutal and blind, his fun was beer. It had swollen his little body and made him grotesque, a fat red man who (the memory is more tolerable than the experience) sat in the Club at nine in the morning with a pint of Tiger and a can of mentholated Greshams, drinking and puffing. Smoke seemed to come out his ears as he grumbled over the previous day's Strait Times.
Here's another:
Fiction is often fatal; it hallows some places and makes them look like dreamland: New York, London, Paris-like the label of an expensive suit. for other places it is a curse. Ayer Hitam seemed tainted, and it was cursed with romance that was undetectable to anyone who was not sitting on the Club verandah with a drink in his hand.
It was another successful fictional account of life elsewhere.
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