O-Zone is a book about the future we fear, but filled with characters we know and can relate to. Theroux's greatest talent, it seems to me, is the authority with which he creates the various worlds he presents in his novels. He presents characters and situations that seem too real to be mere inventions. In O-Zone he tackles the SF genre and does it in style. An almost picaresque tale of a journey into a forbidden desolate 'outback', by characters unfitted by wealth and easy living to deal with what they find. Theroux's story deals with a range of social and human issues with both excitement and humor.
This book, like so much of Theroux, can be read strictly for fun or delved into for deeper meaning.
O-Zone is a rather unusual book for Paul Theroux, a drama in a futuristic setting rather than the contemporary setting of his other novels. Reading O-Zone brings to mind Huxley's Brave New World, both for the portrayal of the world in which it is set, and for the inevitible comparison with another noted novelist who wrote a single book set in a futuristic world.
Like Brave New World, O-Zone explores the alienation of modern man in this world of the future, and the consequant attraction to the primative and atavistic world that is found on the reservation (Huxley) or in the contaminated lands of the O-Zone. And in both books, some of the protagonists go in search of amusement and entertainment from the primatives, but find something disturbingly similar to themselves.