Paul Theroux’s last work of fiction, The Elephanta Suite, was a dyspeptic account of India as experienced by several American visitors. Jerry Delfont, the narrator of A Dead Hand, is a travel writer rather than a mere tourist, but shares something of the earlier book’s horror of the subcontinent. Suffering from writer’s block, he is holed up in a dingy Calcutta hotel waiting for inspiration to strike, when he receives a letter from an American philanthropist called Mrs Merrill Unger. An Indian friend of her son has woken up in a cheap hotel to find the corpse of a boy in his bedroom. Fearing he will be implicated in a crime, he has fled the hotel and gone into hiding. Perhaps Delfont, who has close ties with the US Consulate, can help clear his name?

His curiosity piqued, Delfont agrees to meet Mrs Unger, who dresses in a sari, has feet “tattooed in henna” and turns out to be a dab hand at tantric massage. To anyone less doltish and sex-starved than Delfont, it would be clear from the outset that this faux-Indian benefactress, whom everyone addresses as “Ma”, as they do goddesses in Calcutta, is up to no good. Her particular affinity with Ma Kali, the most bloodthirsty of the Hindu pantheon, ought to raise suspicions — particularly when she takes Delfont to the temple at Kalighat and selects a goat to be splashily sacrificed in front of them.

Delfont, meanwhile, acquires two crucial pieces of evidence: a child’s severed hand and a piece of carpet. Invigorated by this, and by repeated and lingeringly described bouts of tantric nookie with Mrs Unger, he starts to write a book: the book we are now reading. Just in case anyone might mistake Delfont for the author, however, and just as you think this farrago of a novel can get no worse, Theroux himself makes an appearance. Delfont doesn’t care one bit for Theroux, whom he sees as cold, manipulative and cruel — and, it need hardly be said, a much better and more important writer. After Theroux has told him a string of blatant lies, ­Delfont reflects: “We were writers lying to each other, as writers do. The greater the writer, the bigger the lies.” No contest there, then.

Greatness is not much in evidence in this sloppily written and infuriatingly repetitious book. As so often with Theroux, images are lazily recycled: on a train journey the passing countryside is “a chewed-up landscape”; further along the track and four pages later the landscape is “chewed and ruinous”. Driving through Mirzapur is like “passing through the entrails of a huge unhealthy body”, then, further down the same page, “like circulating inside an enormous bloated, sprawling organism”. A hotel proprietor displays a “dark, beaky scowl…imitating a crow-like demon face” and a page later has “the dark, squashy, beaky face of a crow”.

This is at least consistent. As an example of the “trademark clarity of description and observation” Theroux’s publisher promises, how about Mrs Unger’s son, Charlie, who is first described as having “a blushy unsunned face and long light hair swept back”, but 30 pages later is described as “dark” with “curly hair”? When Delfont begins to suspect that Mrs Unger is less benign than she seems, he reflects that her massage table “which I always thought of as an altar…now seemed like a sacrificial table” — but this is exactly what it seemed like the first time he lay on it, like “an animal on a slab…a human sacrifice”. Clarity of observation also places the famous Calcuttan police headquarters on “Bazar Street” rather than Lalbazaar Street and fills the austere South Park Street Cemetery with carved angels, which are in fact notable for their absence there.

Furthermore, the novel’s time scheme is all over the place. The action appears to begin just after Durga Puja, which takes place around October; but Theroux has come to open the Calcutta Book Fair, which takes place at the end of January, and people are already waiting for the monsoon, which doesn’t arrive in Calcutta until June. Unlike Delfont, Theroux clearly doesn’t suffer from writer’s block: A Dead Hand is his 31st work of fiction and gives every impression of being written in a hurry and without the bother of revision.

A Dead Hand by Paul Theroux
Hamish Hamilton £18.99 pp265

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