The title of Paul Theroux’s highly readable but unattractive book is taken from the rooms in which several of the characters stay at the famous Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai. Elephants are, however, symbols of India, and they play a significant role in each of the three loosely interlinked novellas that make up this volume. Characters, too, reappear from one story to another. Further unifying the book is the sense that India is a place in which people have “transformative” experiences.

Theroux’s Americans have come to India for the usual reasons: to stay at an Ayurvedic health spa, to set up outsourcing business contracts, to visit the ashram of a well-known guru.Unlike Adela Quested and Mrs Moore in A Passage to India, they do not want to see “the real India”, but to find “a remote part of it” that is safe.To the wealthy middle-aged couple in Monkey Hill, India is “not a country but a creature, like a monstrous body crawling with smaller creatures, pestilential with people – a big, horrific creature, sometimes angry and loud, sometimes passive and stinking, always hostile, even dangerous”. For the businessman in The Gateway of India, the country is “dirtier, smellier, more chaotic and unforgiving than anywhere he’d ever been”. The young backpacker in The Elephant God feels she has been misled by literature: “The Indian novels she’d read in the States had not prepared her for what she saw here. Where were the big fruitful families from these novels, where were the jokes, the love affairs, the lavish marriage ceremonies, the solemn pieties, the virtuous peasants, the environmentalist, the musicians, the magic, the plausible young men?”

The suggestion seems to be either that Indian novelists oversell their country and culture, or that the world they describe is somehow hidden from foreigners. This is, of course, nonsense. While it might be argued that Theroux is merely representing the views of his western characters, there is also a sense that his unrelentingly grim version of India is being offered as some sort of corrective to the world described in such books as Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy – particularly since the same objection to Indian novels is made twice. Rather than confound their initial impressions, the experiences the characters undergo merely reinforce them.

It is telling that the emblematic elephants in each story are connected with horrifying deaths. Furthermore, what most of the characters learn about themselves, apart from a degree of self-reliance, is their capacity for violence, corruption, degradation and self-deception – they discover this not in reaction to India but, as it were, in collusion with it. The story in which a man benefits from his “transformative” experience of the country ends with him improbably planning to renounce the world and become a sadhu.

Some of the writing is surprisingly slack: “the slop of the sea” is followed by “a slop of mercury” in the next sentence, “obnoxious” is used twice within six lines, and a raped girl is twice likened to an amputee. Similarly, the same basic point is often made several times or presented crudely, as when the businessman involved in a sexual relationship with a teenager attends a charity dinner which, with grinding inevitability, turns out to be in aid of “abused young girls”. On the evidence presented here, Indian novels by Indian writers seem a better option.

THE ELEPHANTA SUITE by Paul Theroux
Hamish Hamilton £18.99 pp278
Buy the book here at the offer price of £17.09 (inc p&p)

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