The Mosquito Coast is a seemingly straightforward adventure story which ends with a splotch of Lord of the Flies-like horror and which trails clouds of dark parable behind it. I think children would like it; the whole novel, which is told by a 13 year old, would enact their fantasies, and they would be agreeably scared by the gruesome end. As for adults, they can enjoy it on a more complex level, since there is an ambiguous interpretive distance between the tale and its young teller. In fact, the novel is made to order for a structuralist analysis of the tension between its story and its narrative commentary, which is to say the contrast between our perspective on the events and that of Charlie Fox, the young narrator.
Like anything by Paul Theroux, moreover The Mosquito Coast is a delight to read. Theroux is a master storyteller…. And he writes uncommonly well. There are wonderfully exotic words here, as well as familiar words in fresh contexts, and metaphors you want to savor. Theroux tries to make the narrative voice that of a 13-year-old, but you have only to compare Charlie Fox's prose persona to Huck Finn's to see how far he fails. Charlie is a touch literary. But if his voice isn't credible, his innocence is, and that is the main thing….
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