“What’s a savage?” he said. “It’s someone who doesn’t bother to look around and see that he can change the world.” (Paul Theroux, Mosquito Coast, Kindle Loc. 2798)
This second book in my Siblings’ 2018 Book Club follows Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee. While I’m three months behind in my review, I think it important to note that of the six adults who’ve joined the Club, only three of us finished reading Mosquito Coast (and even fewer of us finished the fourth installment, The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky). Whether that says more about the Club members or the books we’ve selected, I don’t know, but I’m a bit surprised at the attrition rate for Mosquito Coast. This review will overview the plot of the novel, compare it the 1986 film adaptation, consider the father’s character, and finally compare the story to that of the movie Captain Fantastic, specifically from a Christian point of view.
This story follows a young family whose patriarch has lost faith in American democracy. As an inventor, he feels that he can create a better world, a better civilization, than any that have come before. Having already pulled his kids from school and any sense of normalcy, he then pulls the entire family from the United States itself, moving them to Honduras under the pretense of a lie and in search of the most untouched society in the world, a dream that ultimately evades him.
From one destination to the next, the father slips slowly and ever deeper into a bitter determination to shake every vestige of civilization, no matter how it affects and damages his family. It’s a dark tale of mental abuse that makes a parent think twice about ever getting excited about homeschooling. For this reason, it makes sense that so many compare it to the far more recent (and just as Godless) film, Captain Fantastic. The novel is filled with unforgettable scenes and vivid imagery, but it also drags in many areas and could use a healthy edit.
If you’ve ever seen the 1986 film adaptation starring Harrison Ford, you likely already know the story. Paul Theroux adapted his own novel for the screen and—as was often the case with film adaptations of a generation ago—he thankfully left most of the story and dialogue unchanged. I personally think the ending differed in the film, because as I read the book, I certainly saw no smile on the father’s face or tears in the son’s eyes. Instead I saw vultures tearing out a tongue—about as opposite from the film as it could be, in terms of pleasantness—and a son anticipating a brighter tomorrow now that his oppressor was dead. I was glad to watch the film again after I finished the book, and was reminded of one of the strangest lines I’d ever heard in a movie (and which actually came directly from the book), from the missionary girl on the boat. You might know which line I mean.
The book is written first-person from the eldest son’s viewpoint, so we’re forced to learn about his father through his adolescent eyes. Suited with plenty of dialogue (non-stop, actually) from the father to back up his opinions, the reader is confident that he’d be learning all he really needs to know. Actually, the reader learns far more than he cares to know. As I’ve mentioned before regarding Theroux’s fiction, I found it almost exhausting reading the father’s tirades so endlessly. I found myself writing a note into my Kindle at one point: “The man is thick-skinned and dangerous and a genius and enigmatic. We get it, Paul! Give it a rest already!” I guess I can understand a bit why some in my family put the book down and left it. Early on, I remarked to my siblings, “Sometimes I feel a bit like the dad—-pulling up roots, homeschooling, being politically charged…joking about racism, and pointing at people with my stubby fingers. I just hope I’m not as delusional as he appears to be.” And this little joke tells you a lot about the character.
The man is a bigot, and yet we come to find that he hates materialistic Americans as much as he dislikes the “savages”, South American migrant workers slaving away at a New England asparagus farm.
He used the word savages with affection, as if he liked them a little for it. In his nature was a respect for wildness. He saw it as a personal challenge, something that could be put right with an idea or a machine. He felt he had the answer to most problems, if anyone cared to listen. (Kindle Loc. 49)
At times, I really enjoyed his fuming, and I think Harrison Ford did an admirable job giving the character a voice (and smirk). While at the store, the father offers this, one of my favorite exchanges:
“Let me see some knapsacks. If they’re from Japan, you can keep them.”
“These are Chinese—People’s Republic. You wouldn’t be interested.”
“Give us here,” Father said, and holding the little green knapsack like a rag he turned to Clover. “A few years ago, we were practically at war with the People’s Republic. Red Chinese, we called them. Reds, slants, gooks. Ask anyone. Now they’re selling us knapsacks—probably for the next war. What’s the catch? They’re third-rate knapsacks, they wouldn’t hold sandwiches. You think we’re going to win that war against the Chinese?”
Clover was five years old. She listened to Father, and she scratched her belly with two fingers. “Muffin, I don’t care what you think—we’re not going to win that war.” (Kindle Loc. 773)
As mentioned above, this book has very similar traits to the more recent film, Captain Fantastic. Both fathers home-school their brood of kids, preferring to emphasize survival over what would have been the standard “Common Core” of their respective days, and both are also incredibly anti-God. Whereas the father in Captain Fantastic trains his children to mock Christians for their brainless acceptance of a violent religion (or something along those lines), the father in Mosquito Coast considered the God of Creation a massive failure. He says of God:
“It’s savage and superstitious to accept the world as it is. Fiddle around and find a use for it!” God had left the world incomplete, he said. It was man’s job to understand how it worked, to tinker with it and finish it. I think that was why he hated missionaries so much: because they taught people to put up with their earthly burdens. For Father, there were no burdens that couldn’t be fitted with a set of wheels, or runners, or a system of pulleys. But instead of improving the world, he said, most people just tried to improve God. “God—the deceased God—was a hasty inventor of the sort you find in any patent office. Yes, He had a great idea in making the world, but He started it and moved on before He got it working properly. God is like the boy who gets his toy top spinning and then leaves the room and lets it wobble. How can you worship that? God got bored,” Father said. “I know that kind of boredom, but I fight.” (Kindle Loc. 4197)
I had never heard a single person criticize God before. But Father talked about God the way he talked about jobbing plumbers and electricians. “The dead boy with the spinning top” was the way he described God. “And the top is almost out of steam. Feel it wobble?” (Kindle Loc. 4994)
Clearly the writers behind these characters had well considered the philosophies that drove their lead-men. And I guess we can be thankful for their inadvertent teachings, that “hatred of God isn’t the answer.” I just wish that the sons who chose to rebel (there’s one in each story) had done so out of a divine love instead of human hatred. The authors needn’t have researched the Bible very deeply to have recognized the fallacies behind the fathers’ opinions, and likewise the sons could have discovered the Truth for themselves within the logical bounds of each story. Instead, the sons hate their fathers because they recognize the overall delusion, and they understand how wrong and dangerous the men are. Certainly these are believable plot adjustments in both stories. They’re just not very original.
The “terrible sentence, ‘Christ is a scarecrow!'” (Kindle Loc. 6599) with which Theroux ends the father’s life is an odd one, and it takes some deciphering to understand. I’ll offer my own interpretation. Since the main reference to scarecrows in the story is the one the savages put up in the middle of the night to scare away the birds, and since the main bird reference in the story is the vulture (i.e. everything wrong with society), and since the father ends up being eaten by vultures, the sentence and Theroux’s ultimate message might be rendered as such: “Nothing, especially religion, can save you in the end. It’s all just a temporary salve.” I could be wrong.
Overall, I enjoyed this dark tale, and I’m glad I finished it. I guess I’m even more glad that I never have to read it again! The movie is a well-done adaptation, so if you want a full taste without having to read it all, I suggest you watch the film and then go back and read the final chapter of the book. And say a prayer of gratitude if your family’s not as messed up as this.
©2018 E.T.
Read More from Paul Theroux:
- The Great Railway Bazaar (1975)
- Mosquito Coast (1982)
- O-Zone (1987)
- Riding the Iron Rooster (1988)