Unreal city

LONDON is a deceiver. On an ordinary street the houses can suddenly close in and stop abruptly with a fence. Stray dogs and debris wander into the blocked street. Beyond it is another district, perhaps with a small church or some woods. But the map, marked by intersecting lines, gives no hint of a dead end, no whisper of a pocket of the city which is so neatly hidden. There is nothing to do on such streets but go back or remain trapped, feeling cheated by the map and your imagination.

In his extraordinary new novel, The Family Arsenal, Paul Theroux's characters often are lost like this somewhere in the heart of the city. In fact, stumbling through England's dark, damp, declining metropolis becomes for Theroux like reading that dark, damp, declining novelistic form of sharp turns and blind alleys, the thriller. As in T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, to which The Family Arsenal seems to invite comparison, the characters emerge at first as anonymous voices: a crook prowling a seedy riverside district; an accountant who refuses to yield his house to a rapidly deteriorating neighborhood, an aristocratic woman who collects people like souvenirs. But, as the characters are unmasked with the gradually unwinding plot, each one's terror and terrorizing begins to look and sound more and more alike. Slowly, as in The Wasteland, the story dances itself into a nightmare at every corner where no meeting is accidental and every act compounds the anxiety it was meant to avoid.

In the beginning, though, there is only waiting. Valentine Hood, a displaced American, seeks release from inaction. Hood is drawn to dramatic, gratuitous crime. Less than a year before, as a counsel in Hue, Hood had punched a Vietnamese official for deprecating his own people. Dismissed, he wandered to London where he has set up house with a bunch of almost comical terrorists: Mayo, a rich woman who works for the Irish Republican Army Provisionals and has stolen a Van der Weyden self-portrait which no one seems to want back; Murf, a boy who makes bombs; and Brodie, his girlfriend who plants them. Together, they form a family of sorts, arguing about what to watch on television while a room full of weapons sits upstairs. They are a family with interconnecting lives, yet they know little about each other. Mayo does not explain to Hood why he is kept waiting for a call to action in the IRA.

At the other end of town, Ralph Gawber, an aging accountant, is also waiting. But Gawber's personal drama is not of a new beginning, it is of surviving by "patience, belt-tightening and bookkeeping" through the fast-approaching end. The chaos of migrant families spilling onto his road and the snatches of other people's conversations that Gawber hears over his apparently interconnected telephone wires have deeply disturbed his sense of order and privacy. So like a conspirator, alone with his wife in their enormous house, Gawber "guards against alarm." He has seen the handwriting on the wall. He knows what the football slogan "Arsenal Rule", scrawled across broken windows everywhere, really means. Gawber waits for the great clap of thunder when the ground will open up and London will fall into the sea.

Hood sets the action of the novel in motion. He pursues a man who has bullied a poor street sweeper and beats him to death in a deserted alley. Hood thinks the murder an act complete in itself, but he falls in love with Lorna, his victim's window, and finds an arsenal of weapons in her house.

Even after he realizes that their failure to receive a shipment of arms has postponed the Provisionals' fall offensive and prevented his own hiring, Hood doesn't deliver the guns. He has come to despise the army's terrorism as a kind of play-acting directly opposed to his own truly dramatic sense of violence. In fact, for two of the Provos' fashionable sympathizers, acting and life are terribly confused. Araba Nightwing is a popular actress who proves her dedication to the cause by masquerading as a housewife and ranting against-Punch and Judy shows. Lady Arrow, an aristocratic, bi-sexual people "collector", directs prison plays and gets more of a thrill out of having her things stolen than she does from giving them away. The novel turns on Hood's discovery that Mayo's stolen painting really belongs to Lady Arrow. All action, Hood sees, is political and all politics, drama. This is true not only of the IRA's schemes but also of his own. In Van der Weyden's artistic portrait of a man of action, Hood had come to recognize his own face.

IF THERE IS A FLAW in The Family Arsenal, it is that Theroux's map of London is too well marked. As in theater, nothing is what it appears to be. The apparent innocence of children becomes cruelty. Men are unmasked as women and women, men. Because Theroux insists on our acceptance of his nightmarish conventions from the beginning, nothing come as a real surprise. The connections, like the streets of the city, lead from one to the next.

And like the characters in a play, Theroux's people are most moving when they see most clearly that dead end which is merely a line on the map. For Lady Arrow, the revelation slips in for only a second when her idyllic picture of Hood's quaintly shabby neighborhood is shattered by the dusty characterlessness of the place. For Gawber, the perception of the true nature of modern decline is more annihilating than his imagined House-of-Usher-like holocausts could ever be. Catastrophe, Gawber realizes, is not "fancy's need for theater," it is

--smoke, silence, emptiness and slow decay, an imperceptible leaching that was a strong smell long before it was a calamity. The knotting of the city's innards into dead hanks, not combustion, but blockage, the slowest cruelest death.

From the train depot, Gawber sees the house Hood has bombed as "a low cloud touched by fire" against the night sky. The explosion is distant, unrecognizable, a theatrical spectacular for the eyes. Gawber knows the explosion itself doesn't matter since the life is already dead. "He put his hands to his eyes," Theroux writes, "and tried to stop the tears with his fingers."

It is Hood then who emerges as the novel's unlikely hero because only he can see the real and the imagined and live. For him the explosion is the most dramatic, violent gesture, but one which also bares its own death. In the end, theater reveals as much as it conceals so Hood turns to inaction which, he concludes, is the only "sure assault," a "celebration of security in itself." Within the claustrophobic confines of Theroux's terrifically written novel, Hood is left no choice but to take Lorna and her child and his by now much trusted companion, Murf, and run.

The city is a deciever. In its depths anonymity is enjoyed. But Hood, running to the country, tells Murf that when the new family gets there they will only, "Smoke and tell lies." People cannot live without theater, Theroux's novel teaches. The fault lies not in our cities, but in ourselves.