Word: ayers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Dorothy N. Ayer Olympia, Wash...
...host; among those who were just finishing their undergraduate careers in the mid-1920s, and who came and went within his circle, were Rex Warner, Cecil Day Lewis, Brian Howard, Cyril Connolly, Kenneth Clark, Henry Yorke (Henry Green), John Betjeman, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, John Sparrow, Isaiah Berlin, AJ. Ayer . . . There were giants in the earth in those days, but if in those days they were giants it was still within the context of their own circle; just a very talented group of young...
Those flaws have been fatally enlarged by recent history. The book's nameless narrator has been sent to the Malay village of Ayer Hitam to close down a U.S. consulate that has outlived the prosperity of the American-owned rubber plantations that once flourished there. The Viet Nam War is over. In literary time, it is post-Heart of Darkness and The Ugly American. The real action now takes place in far-flung Hiltons, where multinational businessmen confer in the Esperanto of global trade...
...club where Ayer Hitam's old colonials quietly fade away, time has congealed around 1938. One old boor is revealed as a pseudo reactionary because "he had no politics, only opinions, pet hates, grudges, and a paradoxical loathing for bureaucracy and trust in authority." A Japanese businessman who is cold-shouldered on the tennis courts exacts revenge by elevating one of the club's Malay ball boys to guest status. "The war did not destroy the English," writes Theroux. "It fixed them in fatal attitudes. The Japanese were destroyed and out of that destruction came different...
...Theroux's Ayer Hitam, cultures no longer collide; they sort of frisk each other. "Between jungle and viability, there is nothing," he writes, "just the hubbub of struggling mercenaries, native and expatriate, staking their futile claims." Among them is Margaret Harbottle, one of the ubiquitous breed of freeloaders who roam the world as travel writers, and a toadish old sultan called Buffles, who keeps the past alive with elaborate polo parties. The village itself is a cultural stockpot of Chinese secret societies, Communist cells, Indian sports clubs and groups calling themselves the South Malaysian Pineapple Growers' Association...