To Somerset Maugham it was the F.M.S., to Henri Fauconnier Malaisie, to myself Malaya; to the American writer Paul Theroux … it is Malaysia. It is recognizably the same place in all its nominations, and there is nowhere in the world quite like it. I wrote about it from the viewpoint of a Colonial Education Officer, Fauconnier from that of a French rubber-planter who loved the Malays and was learned in their language. Willie Maugham, who knew the country least, has unfairly effected a literary near-monopoly of it. In Theroux's new volume of stories ["The Consul's File"], narrated by a young American consul who appears in each of them, the Ayer Hitam Dramatic Society puts on an adaptation of "The Letter," and old British expatriates try to behave like Maugham eccentrics. Maugham is always around somewhere, even in the post-Vietnam age, sardonically sipping gin pahits on the...