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BOOK
REVIEW
An antidote to the bad Bangkok
novel
Bangkok 8, by
John Burdett
Reviewed by Lin Neumann
 Bangkok and bad novels: the two just seem to go
together. Set a random number of Westerners down amid
the steamy weirdness of the bars, the over-abundance of
cheap sex and the smilingly enigmatic Thai people, and
an alarming number of them decide to give hard-boiled
fiction a try.
The city should be a natural.
It's weird and wonderful, slightly dangerous and
amusingly hypocritical in all the right places. I
suspect, however, that the real appeal for many would-be
Raymond Chandlers of Bangkok is a desire not so much to
immortalize the city's many charms and sinister corners
as to capture their own peculiar love for its rampant
strangeness. You're in a go-go bar, the girls are
placing flowers on the Buddha altar before stripping
down to supple skin and high heels, you've had a few too
many drinks and, wham, it just hits you. Hey, this place
would make a great novel!
It's a whole genre.
Wily bar girls and jaded farangs, sinister forces
at work. Priapic boy meets girl on the game. Sparks fly.
The stacks are full of these efforts at the local
English-language bookshops, and new ones are published
here all the time. One local author even promotes signed
copies of his many thrillers with well-positioned
placards in the toilets of the Nana Entertainment Plaza,
Bangkok's famous three-floor go-go bar complex, right
next to the condom ads.
The fact that
questionable novels have been written and published
about Bangkok does not mean, though, that this is not
fascinating literary territory. Like Chandler's Los
Angeles of the 1940s, Krung Thep, the "city of angels"
as the Thais call it, is complex and compelling. Few
places on Earth can boast of such a mix of cultures and
temptations in one place. It is true that anything goes,
for a price. The clash and co-existence of Westerners in
great numbers with their patient Thai hosts (and
hostesses) make this fertile ground for the imagination,
a crossroads of greed, lust and vibrant energy.
Finally, in John Burdett's riotous new novel,
Bangkok 8, the city may have found its Chandler.
Attuned to the local tolerance for delicious ambiguity,
Burdett explores crime, Buddhism, crooked cops,
perversions of the flesh, sex-change surgery and the
business of love for rent in a glorious stew that calls
to mind the masters of the crime genre. This is a book
that is right at home on the shelf with Elmore Leonard,
Carl Hiassen, James Ellroy and, yes, Raymond Chandler
and Dashiel Hammet. It really is that good.
A
non-practicing lawyer based in Hong Kong, Burdett has
clearly done his homework. He has spent considerable
time among the Thais, getting to know the country and
its religion. The work pays off in this wild tale told
convincingly from a Thai perspective.
The story
unfolds through the eyes of Detective Sonchai
Jitpleecheep, a devoted Buddhist who, along with his
partner, is the last honest man on the Bangkok police
force. The pair are ordered to track a suspicious
American marine who is soon murdered in a locked car by
a clutch of maddened cobras and a python. Sonchai's
partner coincidentally catches a snake bite to the eye,
and the detective vows revenge for the murder of his
brother policeman.
The seemingly impossible
crime is only the beginning of a suitably sinister plot
that twists through Bangkok's many vices, leading the
reader to meet police colonels on the take, Russian
hookers, speed-crazed slum dwellers and elegant massage
ladies. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
gets in on the act, as a young female agent tries in
vain to bed Detective Sonchai while searching for a
dangerously kinky American jade merchant with a possible
connection to the slain marine.
It is all made,
if not believable, at least plausible by Burdett's gift
for getting inside the head of his Thai characters,
especially Sonchai. The detective is walking testimony
to Thailand's ambivalent contact with the West. The son
of a semi-retired hooker and an unknown American GI, his
mother's considerable charms and many sugar daddies took
mom and son on a veritable world tour as he was growing
up. His reaction to the sex business that fed and
clothed him is to seek Buddhist enlightenment and
forswear the temptations of the flesh but in a very
non-judgmental, Thai way. Needless to say, he remains
close to Mom and rightly proud of her many sacrifices.
In addition, the detective is tuned into many
frequencies. He lives in past and present and is able to
carry on dialogues with his dead partner, the spirits of
his ancestors and the present incarnations of those he
has met in previous lives. Sonchai is matter-of-fact
about the magical Thai reality he inhabits. This is not
weird, it is Thailand, he seems to be saying with a wink
at the many earnest foreigners seeking to make sense of
his homeland.
Not above smoking a little ganja
and aware that corruption sometimes makes the wheel of
life spin a little easier, Sonchai is a perceptive guide
to Bangkok's sordid underside. He is a classic good cop,
a Thai Philip Marlow, operating on the fringes of evil
but maintaining, barely at times, his devotion to
principle. He views all comers in his city with a
certain nonplussed bemusement. Westerners out for a good
time with the bar girls may get fleeced along the way,
but the girls bring magic and badly needed adventure
into their lives. "What we don't realize, we Thais, is
just how simple life is in the West. Too simple,"
Sonchai says at one point, reflecting on the phenomenon
of teenage hookers marrying besotted farangs. The
girls bring a little chaos into their men's lives,
waking them up, de-simplifying things. "Hey, let's hear
it for Thai Girl," he concludes, "selflessly taking the
message of love, life, and lust to a jaded world!"
In this world, no one is truly guilty and no one
is really innocent. The bad do good and the good face
temptation. Even the murderer, once found out, is able
to survive, albeit in a somewhat altered state, thus
relieving Sonchai of the need to kill to satisfy his
thirst for revenge.
In short, this book is a
delight. If you have ever wondered, while deep in your
cups with a teenage village lass perched on your lap,
whether you should write the great novel of Bangkok,
read this one first. John Burdett has set the bar pretty
high.
Bangkok 8 by John Burdett, Knopf
June 2003. ISBN: 1400040442. Price US$24, 336 pages.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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