The Mosquito Coast
Allie Fox, the protagonist in Paul Theroux's novel The Mosquito Coast (published in 1982), believes himself to be the "last real man in America". He is fond of regaling his family with pablums against American society, which he believes to be in a rapid state of deterioration. Americans, he argues, have become so anesthesized to technology and fast food and religion that they no longer possess the ability to be self-sufficient, productive members of society. Citizens of "The Land of the Free" are not free at all; slaves to television and drugs and cheap thrills, Americans are self-destructing without even realizing it.
Allies sees himself differently, and possessing the courage of his convictions he takes his wife and four children to live in isolated jungle on Honduras' Mosquito Coast, as far from modern American society as he could possibly get. His children, raised on a farm and kept out of school, yearn for a normal life yet at the same time place their full trust in their father's vision. Allie is, after all, a mechanical genius who has invented a pollution-free method to produce ice from fire. This he plans to introduce to the Central American "savages" who "don't realize how good they have it".
The Mosquito Coast is narrated by Allie's oldest son Charlie, a boy of thirteen who idolizes his brilliant father yet is tantalized by the American pop culture that eludes him. We see Charlie bravely climbing the rafters of the ship to please his father, the latter exhorting the boy to "conquer his fears". In the jungle, where Allie serves as mayor of a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, Charlie struggles to carve out his own identity and come to terms with the choices his parents have made.
Allie's ice machine is a smashing success, and soon he acquires a religious-like devotion among the natives, who refer to him as "Father". As the town grows, so does Allie's egomania; he never misses an opportunity to remind his family that he alone has provided them with "liberty" and "prosperity".
But inevitably things begin to go wrong. A mission to deliver ice to a neighboring village fails when the ice melts in the tropical heat. Missionaries visit and take away one of the village families, showing that Allie's grip on group ideology is more tenuous that previously imagined. During this period of conflict, the young Charlie begins to see cracks in his father's facade- determined idealism transformed into destructive megalomania.
What makes the book so pleasurable to read are its delicious ironies: hoping to free his family from the constraints of traditional religion and hateful of the Christian missionaries common in the developing world, Allie becomes a religious-like tyrant himself. His version of "liberty" and "freedom" cannot be criticized or challenged; any dissenters are dismissed as cranks and even outright abused. Allie puts his family under considerable strain in order to pursue his vision of paradise- only he fails to realize how selfish he really is.
Everyone knows obsessive parents; the sort of people whose zeal to provide the best possible life for their children results in tyranny. What many adults forget is that their choice to live a certain way was simply that: a choice. Preventing their children from the ability to make similar choices later in life is a very subtle form of abuse. Allie personifies this type.
The Mosquito Coast is masterfully written, as one comes to expect from Theroux, and it stands as a useful diary from the late 70s/early 80s; a period when many Americans took urban crime, high energy prices, a slumping economy, the success of the Japanese and the persistence of the Soviets as proof that America was in irreversible decline. Few I suspect removed themselves from society to the extent that Allie did, yet as Allie himself says, "I never stop until I get where I'm going". He is not a man to do things half-way.
