Paul Theroux has chosen to measure himself against a very tall ghost indeed: Joseph Conrad. Jungle Lovers is an audacious attempt to tell the other half of The Heart of Darkness, to reveal precisely what it was about Africa that drove the humanitarian trader, Kurtz, out of his mind and reduced him to a raving savage with human skulls impaled atop his palisade.

The novel's setting is the Central African peanut republic of Malawi, a country that is in actual fact at least half fictitious—one of those arbitrary creations of European colonialism that bears little relation to any economic, geographical, ethnic, or other observable reality. It is a figment of the imperial imagination that has been converted, by the stroke of a pen and the hoisting of a flag, into a modern political illusion. The place is ideal for Theroux's purposes; he could scarcely have invented a better one. It is a black country with a white past, a present that is both arbitrary and impoverished, and a future that is bleak. Torn by conflicting cultural forces, its population has been reduced to living out a compulsive parody of Anglo-South African civilization…. Yet as Theroux is at some pains to show, this seemingly slavish and degrading mimicry of an alien white culture has less to do with ideas than with things. It is a kind of cargo cult that really works in a sporadic way.

In Theroux's view, to be African is to deal with the particularized and the immediate, whereas to be Western is to be abstract, having to do with words, postures, dogma, and time. Malawi itself is just such a Western abstraction and so for that matter, is anything pertaining to politics in the accepted Western sense. In the African cultural climate, Westerners tend to become abstractions of themselves, types rather than men, like Major Beaglehole, Theroux's best creation, who contrives to scale heights of Britannic fatuity, ignorance, charm, childishness, and decency that have seldom been reached by an Englishman in an American novel. If the Africans are living out a parody of someone else, Beaglehole and his fellow Britons have become parodies of themselves. It is either that or be destroyed; for as Theroux realizes, they are not parodying their weaknesses, but their strengths.

Theroux's protagonists, like Kurtz, are humanitarians; Calvin Mullet, a sincere young boob of an insurance man from Massachusetts, and the Canadian guerrilla, Marais, who leads a small, all-native band in an attempt to bring down the government. Each has come to save the African, Mullet with American insurance, Marais with the Cuban revolution. In the manner of all missionaries, they have come, not to learn, but to teach. Both fail….

Both sociologically and politically, Jungle Lovers is a first-rate performance—informative, colorful, and insightful. As a piece of cross-culture fiction, it is the best thing of its kind to come along since Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments, and Paul Theroux is much the better novelist of the two. His portrait of modern Malawi is as good as one could want, and the book deserves a wide readership on the basis of his insights alone. Throughout the book one seems to hear the echoes of Conrad's voice and that most extraordinary of tales, that begins: "And this also … has been one of the dark places of the earth."