Word: hooded
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...