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: After his trail-blazing The Great Railway Bazar, about his travels in the sub-continent and beyond, Paul Theroux’s India novels have been disappointing to say the least. The last one, Elephanta Suite, deals with three American experiences in India with one tourist admitting, “India attracted you, fooled you, subverted you, then, if it did not succeed in destroying you with the unexpected, it left you so changed as to be unrecognisable.” Theroux is clearly not willing to see the big picture, still intent on focusing on the filth and decay, not just physically. So, why does he return to India, to Calcutta, to set his latest novel in? There are no clues to that in this tale of mystery. A Dead Hand is littered with “hand” stories, not least about a writer who suffers from writer’s block and hence “a dead hand”. But lest you think, the writer with a block is Theroux himself—he did give himself a large role in his part fiction, part memoir In My Other Life —he walks in as himself in this novel. Theroux did visit Kolkata in 2008 when the book fair was aborted at the last minute. The story about a mysterious American philanthropist in Calcutta and her plea to a writer to solve a crime isn’t engaging enough. And it’s full of cliches: “No matter where I was, the street noise, the reminder that Calcutta was dense with restless people, where the stinks were so sharp they seemed audible, the diesel fumes of taxis and buses, the reek of garbage, of shit…” Really, Theroux has had enough of India.
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