A tightly plotted, very disturbing novel.

chris (Japan) (2012/07/30):
Charles Dicken's grim London is mashed up with Antonioni's mod London and Graham Greene's moody tone in this tale of a young American Foreign Service dropout escaping the United States-Viet Nam war who crashes in a London slum with a small band of half-hearted hipster/Irish revolutionaries.

His depictions of London are vivid and I found myself checking Wikipedia to compare his descriptions of each neighborhood against the reality, and I found that even with the passage of 35 years, his descriptions hold true. This is evidence of Theroux's keen eye as a travel writer.

The tone is an attempt at both moody sentimentality and social satire.

One sees the author modelling himself as a resourceful tough guy in the hero.

Other than the hero, the characters and situations are drawn somewhat thinly. Depictions of sexual longing and sexual situations in general seem most well-drawn and realistic.

The whole story doesn't quite hold together. 5 or 6 characters are drawn together from different parts of London in an excessive amount of meet-cute.

The denouement is rather tidy.

I won't describe the whole plot out of respect for Theroux initiates who will enjoy the writing on a page-by-page basis, as I did, without necessarily admiring the whole.

Also be warned that there are pages of flights of fancy every 10 pages or so that are somewhat tedious to plow through.

The author is at his best in depicting sexual situations and action situations. The passages depicting character's inner motivations are generally rather tedious, and many character stereotypes are invoked.

The politics of the novel are not the main driving force of the story, which is character driven. While the scaffolding has a lot of politics in it, overall the politics are completely irrelevant, because the story is centrally about the feelings and sense of isolation of the main character.

The novel was written in 1975, when the author was 34 or so, and this relative youth may account for some of the stereotyping and the thin-ness of the characters.