Forty years later, after a failed suicide attempt, her granddaughter, Irene Vilar, wakes up in a psychiatric hospital. Its contempt for its characters creates little inducement to care for their fate - whatever the flag fluttering overhead.. Betty emerges as a Thatcher-like iron witch willing to "do business" with Hung and sell the local workforce down the river Yet this is a strangely uninvolving novel. Envisaging executions on the Happy Valley race course, the novel scoffs at Deng Xiaoping's pledge that "the horses will go on running".There is arguably an even-handedness in Theroux's disdain. The PLA officer Hung's manner of eating chicken feet portends a regime's criminal malevolence. It is Hong Kong", and the buy-out "not a sale at all, but a hand-over". But where do the two diverge? One hopes that it is Bunt's eyes which see the "houseboy" Wang as having "snake's features", or the drunken Hung, "his face pinkish and raw, his eyes boiled".The difficulty is partly that the caricatures carry symbolic burdens Imperial Stitching is "the best of British.
Perhaps most unsettling is the portrayal of Mei-ping, an "eye-eye" (illegal immigrant) and Bunt's employee and lover, as a cringing supplicant ("it was her begging postures that drove him wild"). Theroux's peremptory attempt to endow her with dignity and seal Bunt's sentimental conversion is unconvincing.The third-person narrative is pervaded by the views of characters who see the Chinese as "civilised cannibals" No doubt that vision is distinct from that of the novel. Seeking a weak revenge against her smothering possessiveness, he fosters a misogynistic secret life in "blue hotels" and "chicken houses".Yet if the colonials are skewered in the novel, they at least possess inner lives, a flawed humanity Not so the Chinese. Only the Mullards' dead business partner Mr Chuck is sketched sympathetically, and he was an Anglican who hated China.
Her son has never made the hour-long train ride to China, despite having lived in Hong Kong for all his 43 years.Bunt blames Hong Kong for drawing hustlers and tax-dodgers of no fixed allegiance, for "the way it cut off people's roots and made them selfish and sneering and greedy and spineless" But, unlike Betty, he has no "home" to flee to. Betty, with her loose dentures and witless sarcasm, who says "leave off" and "pack it in", and calls a punch a nuckoo samwidge, despises "Chinky-Chonks", whose food she never touches. Yet as the sinister Mr Hung from the mainland contrives to buy out their garment business, Imperial Stitching, and Betty is seduced by the prospect of genteel retirement in England on "a million quid", Bunt senses "the certainty that next year and in the future there would be more men like this - smiling, pestering, threatening, insinuating; and enforcing the law". Theroux is astutely acerbic, if condescending, about the expatriate insularity of "jumped up" colonials such as Betty from Balham. But for all its stretches and bumps, Love Invents Us stays in the mind This is a very talented, very upsetting writer.. Paul Theroux has marked Hong Kong's imminent handover with a curious novel that scourges the English dregs of Britain's last major colony while warning darkly of worse things to come. In Albion Cottage on the island's Peak, Betty Mullard and her Hong Kong- born son Neville, or "Bunt", are determined to ignore the reversion to Beijing's rule - the "Chinese takeaway".
She suffered from the opposite of `phantom limb' syndrome; something essential appeared to be present, but it was not."When Max is dying, she goes back to nurse him, and finds she has in some way always loved him. This is not a punitive or even a moral narrative, but one which fixes on love's peculiar and perverse unaccountability. In doing so, the novel is too anxious to see Elizabeth's story through, over too many years, when what it really does best is the teenage emotional landscape and the contained, unsequential encounters using up energy "in some small airless place". Bloom's stories work better than this novel: she should keep company with Alice Munro and Flannery O'Connor, and make stories her forte. (We get his feelings, unpleasantly well done, as much as hers.) Elizabeth's later story (a passionate affair with the school's black baseball champ, their enforced separation, her parents' divorce, her mother's death) are all overshadowed by this first emotional exploitation, which seems to stop her from ever getting a life."Elizabeth knew that the bad things that had happened to her were no worse than other people's bad things; they were pretty small potatoes, in fact, compared to terminal cancer, death by famine, incest, quadriplegic paralysis Nevertheless, whatever effort life required .. Elizabeth didn't have it She was .. not an affront to society She paid her bills She didn't smell or piss on other people's lawns. But she ends up making some sort of part-acceptable narrative out of her life, possibly by giving love rather than looking for it. We first see her (as in one of the Come To Me stories) at 15, a neglected Jewish daughter of high-achieving parents, modelling fur coats in her underwear for the elderly Mr Klein, shoplifting, stealing from the half- blind black lady she looks after (an excellent character), knuckling under to the school bullies and flirting with the English teacher.