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Summary: Exciting, a probe into human thinking.
Review: One of the best stories to ever examine the human psyche, craftily done through the eyes of a child. Allie Fox represents the purist in all of us, a genius not gone mad, but obsessed with his own selfish dreams. Charlie Fox tells the story of how his family "escapes" America to establish a new way of life in the steam and heat of the Mosquito Coast. But Charlie's father Allie destroys what he labored so hard to create, not because it wasn't perfect, but because Allie himself could not deal with real world that surrounds us all
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Summary: A study of ideals
Review: Paul Theroux's best novel ever explores the mind of a genius who wishes to estrange himself from American materialist society, told through the eyes of his adolescent son Charlie. Any Theroux reader can sympathize with the main character's mind as he tries to create a utopia in the tropics of Central America: his motives, his rise to pwer, and his downfall
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Summary: Gripping! Theroux's tale of a fanatical genius is amazing!
Review: The Mosquito Coast is a masterful piece of work. Paul Theroux's tale of Allie Fox and his decent into madness rivals many of our greatest works of literature. It's like "Robinson Crusoe" gone wrong, as a brilliant inventor shuns the American way of life and attempts to build himself and his family a paradise on the Mosquito Coast. His dream turns into a nightmare as his paradise crumbles around him. For ANYONE who loves great literature, The Mosquito Coast is the new standard in storytelling
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Summary: Simply amazing
Review: I don't mean to offend previous reviewers, but calling Allie Fox "magnetic" doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. He is, simply put, the most fascinating character I have ever encountered in fiction. He leaps off the page. This book is outstanding!
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Summary: Everybody hates Allie Fox
Review: "The Mosquito Coast" is the story of Allie Fox and his family. Allie calls himself an "inventor", trying to make his life better by ways of using stuff at hand and putting them together in the form of new machinery.Tired of the life in the United States, he predicts doom will fall over his native country, and takes his family (his wife and four children) to a deserted spot in rural Honduras. There, he builds an ice machine in an effort to make all people surrounding him, even native indians, believe his way of life is better than any other. But suddenly things star to go wrong... The story is told by Allie's elder son, Charlie. Like everybody else in the Fox family, he desperately tries to believe his father is something close to a god. But the problem is that each page of the book shows an Allie madder and more tyranical than the page before. That's what is best in Theroux novel. Allie is so simple he becames suddenly complex. He has everybody in an iron grip, but when the environment turns against him he doesn't realize that grip isn't strong enough. The book can be divided in three parts: leaving USA, the Jeronimo village and the end. While the first is plainly introductory and the second is mostly descriptional (sometimes they get pretty slow) the final part is as histerical and raving mad as Allie Fox. This third part is enough to give the book an upgrading from four to five stars. A very good book.
Grade 8.7/10
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Summary: There's No Place Like Home...
Review: Allie Fox is a struggling Yankee inventor disgusted with the rampant materialism and money-grubbing he finds in the United States. Convinced the country is going to pot, he burns his last bridge and takes his family to Honduras and its Mosquito Coast, to get away from a culture that hoards goods and sells cheese in spray cans.
It's hard not to feel some empathy with Fox, especially the way he is described by the book's narrator, his preteen son Charlie. But author Paul Theroux has some surprises in store for those expecting a 20th-century Swiss Family Robinson idyll in the Third World.
Theroux does two things in this book I really like. One is the way he writes about the land of the Mosquito Coast, with lush descriptions of rainforests where pacas and tapirs burrow for grubs and an eerie cave-like silence is broken by the bull-fiddle bellow of a curassow. Or the way he describes the river camp Fox and his family set up, "a twisted blue vein in the muscle of the jungle." Theroux's acclaimed for writing like this, and you might find yourself reaching for the bug spray between chapters.
The other is the character of Allie, who Theroux makes clear from the outset is all-too-human, and not a little screwy. Even before making landfall in Honduras, Allie browbeats young Charlie into climbing to the top of a ship's mast and dangling himself from an overhanging shroud. "Seasickness is just a misunderstanding of the inner ear," Allie yells at the frightened boy, at once mocking and misrepresenting the real danger he has put the child in.
Allie is a great inventor, and Theroux imaginatively portrays how Yankee ingenuity might make some headway in the wilds of central America. But he is at heart selfish and insecure, about himself and his place as head of a family he can't provide for. "If there was one thing Father did not know, it was this: he did not need to prove himself to us," Charlie tells the reader.
Yet Allie keeps pushing a fragile situation onto more dangerous ground. With every success he smells complacency, materialistic grasping, and the dangerous influence of Christian missionaries, whose gospel of external reliance he abhors. Or maybe he just minds the competition. After he makes ice in the jungle, an impressive feat of limited practicality, Allie talks about being a kind of God, only one that finishes what he starts.
"The Mosquito Coast" was published in 1982, and I sense Theroux was more than slightly influenced by the then-recent horror of a cult leader named Jim Jones who led his followers to Guyana, not far from Honduras, and eventually induced a mass suicide. Not that Fox is much like Jones externally, but there are echoes of the Jonestown tragedy in this book, and they become more pronounced as the narrative develops.
The negative thing about "Mosquito Coast," and it's significant, is it's not an easy book to read. It's well-written, but all Allie, all the time. Some reviewers here note Allie's wife doesn't get much of a description, not even a name, but I had more trouble accepting the lack of detail with Charlie's siblings. There are three of them, but you don't really know who's who and what they are about. One is actually something of a rebel to Allie's command, but this isn't adequately developed until the final third of the book.
Even when they go off with some other children to a special place away from Allie called "the Acre," there is little detail given about Charlie's relationships with these children. The reader is instead forcefed Charlie's feelings about Allie, even when Allie isn't around. I found the story limited on this basis. Surely Theroux could have chopped a few lines from Allie's rants, which are repetitive anyway, and given Charlie's separate world more room to breathe.
But "The Mosquito Coast" keeps you interested more often than not, is an excellent showcase for Theroux's mastery of his craft, and leaves you with some pretty thick meat to chew on, specifically about when people need to light out and explore the world around them and when they are better off staying home.
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Summary: Makes "Lord of the Flies" look like a joke book!
Review: I took this book with me on my honeymoon to the Dominican and read it every spare moment I got. Theroux is an amazing writer and his voice comes out in the novel as a young teen boy who is caught up in his father's madness.
Charlie, the narrator, tells the story progressively from the time "Father" uproots this American family only to set them down in the virgin jungles of Honduras. The father is a genius of sorts as well as a Harvard dropout who believes America has become "Hell" in many ways with its capitalism and poison. The father is undoubtedly a very smart man and his innovations and inventions throughout the book are truly believable and amazing. Theroux has a true knack for imagery.
Of course, "Mother" and the other children look up to their father and believe everything he says. AS the novel progresses, the father spirals further and further into his own self-made paranoid madness while dragging his family along for the ride.
This book is something of a nail biter, though it has its funny moments. Some of the dialogue between the children is really quite humorous. They call each other names like "spackoid," "crummo," and "thicko," which is of course a telltale sign that it was written in the eighties. Nevertheless, as the book nears the end, some severely twisted events occur, events that you will likely hope for and be repulsed by at the same time.
It is slightly reminiscent of "Lord of the Flies" in that it shows what isolation from the familiar can do to people. Honduras becomes a most Godless place for the family known as "The Foxes."
As far as I'm concerned, the story reads more like a crazy truth than fiction. The dialogues Theroux gives to the natives in the book are very realistic and the situations and emotions are so vivid that you will not be able to put the book down. At least this was the case for me.
After having read "The Mosquito Coast," I will definitely read other novels by this author. He is an ingenious writer.
The end will surely have you screaming for more, but, if you are one of those light at heart readers who get sore when the ending isn't happy (i.e. unrealistic) I suggest something else. This one may give you nightmares and a certain doubt in humanity.
To sum it all up, it is dark in more ways than one and it involves what happens to the impressionable mind of young Charlie when he is made to live day to day in squalor and to follow the laws of a father who is slowly going insane. Don't miss this one!
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Summary: Disturbing
Review: Allie Fox, a mechanical genius, drags his wife and four children to the wilds of Honduras to live a life free from the commercialism and corruption of America. The story is told from the point of view of his oldest son, Charlie. I can't help but wonder how the narration would have been different from other family members' points of view, especially the mother, whose name was not mentioned once, as far as I remember. Allie is insane in the manner of Hitler, Mussolini or some other dictator, but his only population to control is one family and some unsuspecting natives. He would obviously like to remake the world in his own image if given the chance. He makes a model village in the jungle called Jeronimo, where he is king of a warped kingdom. Disaster, of course, is not far away. I had a hard time reading this because my mind kept wandering trying to diagnose Allie. (Bipolar with 95% of the time in a state of mania?) Just when I thought the family's situation could not get more desperate, it did. This book is very good but so depressing I found it very hard to finish. Read it if you want a voyeuristic look at a family tragedy and the insane proclamations of a madman. (My favorite quote from Allie Fox: "Science fiction gave people more false hope than two thousand years of Bibles")
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Summary: Extraordinary Character Study
Review: Paul Theroux's novels generally feature carefully etched characters, but he surpasses himself with Allie Fox, the protagonist of the Mosquito Coast. Allie is a husband and father of four, but he seems to care far more about his "inventions" and radical social ideas than he does about their welfare. To act out his ideals, he moves his family to Central America to start a utopian society, unencumbered by traditional materialism. Some of his contraptions work and the community begins to flourish, until his plans become grandiose. Although the reader can see the tragedy that is to come, Theroux constructs an intriguing plot that keeps the reader drawn into the novel. Some readers may be greatly off-put by Allie and his behavior; however, he is undeniably a magnetic and fascinating force. Fortunately, the book is narrated from the point-of-view of the teenaged son, Charlie, which allows the reader some distance from the sometimes repugnant Allie. Other readers may be disappointed by Allie's wife. She plays a relatively small role in the proceedings, and she seems to blindly go along with Allie, even when she suspects detrimental effects on her family. However, a man like Allie probably would be married to such a woman, as he likes to be in charge and assert himself on others strongly. Overall, the Mosquito Coast is a one-of-a-kind literary experience, with a fantastic main character embedded in a rollicking-good story. Most highly recommended.
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