Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...