In a article in Harper’s several years ago Tom Wolfe argued that the reality that we see on the news every day was getting so bizarre and extreme that it was outstripping the imaginations of novelists to conjure characters and plots that could compete with reality. [1] In hindsight Wolfe might have been foretelling the emergence of “reality television” where people will eat worms and push their mother’s off a cliff for money. Less prophetically, rather than signaling the end of the novel, bizarre reality appears to have pushed novelists to greater efforts to stay ahead of it.
But in some places reality has always to be conflated with a sense of the unreal. Bangkok is one such place. Part of it owes to the steamy and spicy exoticism of Southeast Asia, but then Singapore would never be mistaken for Bangkok. Given a choice where a soldier or sailor might spend his “R & R” there is no choice. Bangkok 8 , is not a book that will remind visitors of the Royal Palace, Wat Po, or the klongs that give the city the air of an Asian Venice. It is the Bangkok of night, of pole dancers half glimpsed through fuchsia-tinted strobe light, of gaggles young whores trotted out behind glass, and all of the twisted, epicene, weirdness produced by the mutual exploitation of East meets West.
This story digs well beneath the underbelly of brothels and bars in search of something kink enough to out to a reality that is reputed to offer just about anything the imagination can conjure. I am not much of a reader of thrillers and detective pulp, particularly those written for guys who need some sort of macho hero. It takes some courage or hubris for a farangauthor to compose a first-person narrative in the voice of a native in spite of the fact Burdett’s protagonist is an Amer-Asian detective, Sonchai Jitpleecheep. The story opens with a huge Black American ex-patriot being found in a homeless squatter area dead of bites from vipers that somehow got into his Mercedes Benz. In the process of the investigation of the crime scene Sonchai’s partner, Pichai, is killed by one of the snakes from a bite in the eye. From there it is a reveal that involves Sonchai, American operatives, corrupt cops/drug dealers, and never anything like straight, missionary position, sex.
I picked up Bangkok 8 for its description of a fascinating city I saw mostly from the tourist’s angle, for an inconsequential trip into its under-culture that only guys my age with more money than sense patronize. It delivers that well enough. I have a better sense of how that part of the city is structured to service such a market, and how drugs and corruption mingle to both promote and exploit it. Burdett makes much of the assertion that the place runs on yaa baa , the local version of methamphetamine. But the story of the bizarre murder kept calling for attention. Detective Sonchai never turns out to be the macho hero, nobody does, and maybe misses his dead partner for more reasons. Everybody, the Americans, the corrupt cops, the drug and jade dealers, are undone; only the whores and slave boys seem able to turn being commodified into a form of survival.
Not that Bangkok 8 comes off as some sort of metaphor or classic that stands for something larger than Bangkok or its perversions. [2] I wouldn’t expect it to turn up on the reading list in a comparative lit class, more likely in something like SE Asian pop culture. But it also isn’t that pulp that is turned out page by formulaic page about former CIA guys who can kick bad guy ass all day and screw sultry Asian women all night. Bangkok’s reality is probably too bizarre for that.
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 6.19.2005)
[1] “Stalking the Billion-footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel,” Harper’s Magazine , November, 1989, pp. 45-56
[2] Apparently Knopf feels that Burdett might be building a readership for his somewhat improbable detective “hero.” Bangkok Tattoo was recently reviewed in the New York Times Book Review (June 5. 2005) with the claim that “Burdett’s contribution to the contemporary mystery novel may be his break with the genre’s Puritanism about the sex trade.”