The narrator of Paul Theroux’s new novel set in Calcutta is a writer suffering from that most painful of ailments, writer’s block. Travel writer Jerry Delfont has come to India for a story, but he is overwhelmed by the land itself: “India in its sprawl seemed to me less a country than a bloated village, a village of a billion, with village pieties and village pleasures and village peculiarities and village crimes.” He has been holed up at the Hotel Hastings, off Sudder Street “in populous Calcutta, city of deformities… in every sense buried alive”.

If it does sound as if Delfont has been reading rather a lot of Theroux, it’s not a surprise to find that midway through the book Paul Theroux himself makes an appearance, staying at that Calcutta institution, the Fairlawn. “In any other city it would have passed for colourful and fun,” reflects Delfont, who goes to meet the writer, as he does everything else, with a sense of reluctance. “In Calcutta it seemed joyless, even menacing, the sort of place Theroux might use as a setting for his Indian fictions….” The conversation that the two writers proceed to have is clever but oblique, like a conversation between two people reflected in water. “Theroux didn’t want me to know him, didn’t want anyone to know him, which was why he did nothing but pretend to write about himself, never quite coming clean, offering all these versions of himself until he disappeared into a thicket of half-truths he hoped was art.”

... contd.