Paul Theroux's comic and disturbing fifth novel, Jungle Lovers [is] set in the brilliantly, and sometimes maliciously, realized Malawi of today. His fable, with roots in satiric caricature and documentary terror, uses the linguistic complexity to underscore the wavering relationships between lingering British, Africans, and the two American protagonists, a genial insurance salesman, Calvin Mullet, and a tough, often brutal, revolutionary, Marais, the dissolution of whose interlinked ideals forms the central theme of the book….

The fable has a circularity which passes through so many degrees of the chillingly terrible, and so many of the humanly amusing, before it comes full-circle when Marais takes out one of the few policies Calvin sells and makes the as yet unborn son of Calvin and his Black wife his beneficiary before going to his death in the so-called "liberated" area. This clinches the point but has a slightly irritating air of contrivance; and yet it is the same cool, sometimes cold-blooded, control that guarantees the success of so much of the book. The background is mercilessly accurate, with the littered rejects and incongruous assimilations of post-colonial "culture contact" that have their antecedents in the absurd, decaying machinery of Heart of Darkness…. Some are originally observed, some the stock-in-trade of every expatriate reminiscence…. Some seem the throwaways of an irresistible brightness, as when his African trainee tells Calvin that "Thomas Hobbies" [sic] was right: "Life in Africa is nasty, British and short." All in all, though, there is the same brilliance of detail that distinguished this young author's other African novel, Girls at Play.