The London Embassy by Paul Theroux was published in 1982. It is not so much a novel as a collection of linked short stories, narrated by the same American diplomat who featured in a previous book, The Consul’s File. He has now been posted for a term of duty in London. It rather reminds me of the writing of Somerset Maugham.
It’s a sort of fictional parallel to Theroux’s own life as an expatriate American writer in London. One suspects that the diplomat’s observations of London and its natives are very much Paul Theroux’s own. This is London seen clearly through the eyes of an outsider. It is these observations that give the book its fascination: “The city had been built to enclose secrets, for the British are like those naked Indians who hide in the Brazilian jungle – not timid, but fanatically private and untrusting.”
The narrator’s work brings him into contact with all kinds of eccentric characters and odd situations. His neighbours include a quiet civil servant and a loud motorcyclist, heard but never seen. Are they, in fact, one and the same person?
He has to deal with a mentally unstable American poet, a cross between Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound. There is an encounter with a group of expensively educated and mindlessly prejudiced schoolboys.
It is made clear that he is not a spy (they are based on the third floor) but his job does involve the gathering of information. He almost enters the world of espionage when he is approached by a wily Russian would-be defector, and manages to outwit him. He has to employ similar sleight of hand when he is tasked with enforcing the embassy’s rather informal dress code.
Perhaps best of all is the story “An English Unofficial Rose”, in which the narrator is under the impression that a young woman wants a romantic relationship with him, when her real reason for seeing him is something quite different. As he says: “Language is deceptive; and though English is subtle it also allows a clever person –one alert to the ambiguities of English – to play tricks with mock precision and to combine vagueness with politeness. English is perfect for diplomats and lovers”.
This book is almost forty years old now, and this is not quite the London of today. In general the social attitudes of the narrator are quite modern, almost ahead of their time, but here and there is a reminder that things have changed, just as the American Embassy is no longer the building in Grosvenor Square.
Paul Theroux’s sojourn in Britain also produced the excellent The Kingdom By the Sea, a lightly fictionalised record of his trip around the coastline. In the end, though, he did not stay in Britain, but settled in Hawaii, where he was a neighbour of ex-Beatle George Harrison. Who can blame him?
The Good Reader 