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Buddhist detective gives crime thriller exotic twist

The Bangkok Asset by John Burdett
The Bangkok Asset by John Burdett

I'll admit I'm careful with my light reading. We are allotted only so many hours and there are lots of things I want to do, so sometimes it just isn't practical to get sucked into a sideways world of another's imagination.

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The Blue Guitar - John Banville

Still, I have always been susceptible to a certain kind of smart pulp -- I tend to devour James Ellroy's crime novels as soon as I get my hands on them. About a decade ago I burned through 14 of James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels in the space of a year. I regard Elmore Leonard's crime fiction and Lee Child's Jack Reacher books with the same sort of suspicion I hold for cocaine -- anything so addictive and fun cannot possibly be good for you.

Same goes for John Burdett's Bangkok series of novels that detail the exotic adventures of Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a detective with the Royal Thai Police. I read five of the six books in the series that started in 2003 (somehow I missed 2012's Vulture Peak; I'll have to pick up the paperback) and I've just finished the most recent installment, The Bangkok Asset.

Asset, like all of Burdett's Bangkok books, is a pleasant combination of the familiar and the strange. Sonchai is like a lot of detective heroes, a perpetual outsider with a philosophical bent. He's a Buddhist, a leuk krung (half-caste) who is the son of a former mia chao (a "rented wife," a prostitute who lives with a client for an extended period) and a farang (white person of European descent), an American soldier. Thanks to the largesse of his mother's admirers, Sonchai spent much of his childhood in the U.S. and Europe, where he acquired a degree of cultural sophistication. He is a world traveler with a good deal of familiarity with Western, Confucian, Buddhist, Latin and North African societies. He is James Bond, content with life as a humble civil servant.

Back in Thailand as a young man, Sonchai became addicted to yaa baa (methamphetamine) and with his friend Pichai stole cars to pursue his habit. After Pichai murdered their dealer, he and Sonchai sought sanctuary in a Buddhist monastery where, after "six months of mosquitoes and meditation, remorse had gouged [their] hearts." The abbot then told them they would atone for their mistakes by becoming policemen.

But not just any sort of policemen -- Sonchai and Pichai were to become arhat cops, which is something more than just an honest, dutiful servant. An arhat is something like a Buddhist saint, "a fully realized man who voluntarily pauses on the shore of nirvana, postponing his total release in order to teach his wisdom." Sonchai and Pichai were to be totally incorruptible, willing to lay down their lives for their duty (something that Pichai does in the opening pages of the first novel, Bangkok 8).

This quality does not always endear Sonchai to his fellow officers or to his superior, the remarkably corrupt Col. Vikorn -- the abbot's younger brother -- to whom Sonchai is as loyal as his complicated belief system will allow. Sonchai is unbribeable in a system where corruption is taken for granted.

"[I]n the whole of the Royal Thai Police Force there is one arhat, one pure, unblemished soul valiantly and heroically doing his job while the rest of us slop around in the sleaze," Vikorn tells Sonchai in a typical rant from the first book. "Have you any idea what s*** you're dragging us into?"

But if the crooked Vikorn keeps Sonchai around because he occasionally has use for an honest man, there's also a tender paternal side to him. Vikorn is another of Sonchai's mother's admirers. He helped set her up as the proprietor of the Old Man's Club, a Viagra-dispensing brothel for older, mostly farang, clients. He's a father figure to Sonchai, who is naturally obsessed with finding his own father.

That obsession is one of the driving themes of the recently published The Bangkok Asset (Knopf, $25.95). The book begins with a horrible murder, the decapitation of a young schoolgirl in the market behind the police station to which Sonchai is assigned. Across a mirror in the room, scrawled in the victim's blood, is the cryptic message:

"Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, I know who [smudge] father is."

Sonchai is soon paired with young female inspector Krom, and both are called to witness a demonstration of what might be an artificially enhanced super soldier, a remarkable farang specimen seemingly controlled by an ex-CIA operative.

The machinations of the plot eventually lead Sonchai deep into the Cambodian jungle, where he encounters a British psychologist and contemporary of Timothy Leary named Christmas Bride. Bride, it seems, worked on a covert project for the American government during and after the Vietnam War.

Burdett, a British citizen who worked as a lawyer in Hong Kong for a dozen years, makes good use of the exotic setting. While I've never been to Bangkok, he's supplied me with a finely detailed simulacrum of a city redolent with sex and spice where wise, big-hearted prostitutes meet with callow tourists in Soi Cowboy, one of city's famous red-light districts. There's a precision to his writing that pierces through the familiar tropes of detective fiction. Burdett's Bangkok may be a city of ghosts and monsters, but it's also concrete, pollution and traffic -- an intricately designed city with a system of moral checks and balances as complex and sensitive as a pachinko machine.

And Sonchai is, despite his incorruptibility, hardly a simple hero. He's got a fully human complement of vices and appetites, of which a weakness for "pot" may be the most ordinary. In recent books he's acquired a wife, though in The Bangkok Asset, that doesn't keep him from being fascinated with Krom, who is, in turn, fascinated with Sonchai's wife. Sonchai is a devout but skeptical seeker constantly questioning his place in the universe as he struggles to come to terms with his incompleteness.

Much of that has to do with his absent father and his mother's unwillingness to divulge much about the man.

Another interesting thing about Burdett's Bangkok novels is the way they filter outrageous B-movie plots through the reflective consciousness of Sonchai's character. Boiled down synoptically, The Bangkok Asset is about the creation of a super-human, an artificially enhanced soldier developed by covert U.S. interests using Southeast Asia as a base. But what's more interesting than the paranoid fantasy is the way contemplative Sonchai rides these improbably wild waves. His voice never falters or wavers; you never get the sense that you're attending to the author rather than the detective. In a way, Sonchai is analogous to a wonderful character actor, one you could watch in anything.

...

John Banville is one of those writers who has adopted a nom de genre -- he's Benjamin Black when he writes crime fiction. This suggests a certain bifurcated soul; when he writes as Banville we can presume he's "being serious," that he's engaging in literature rather than common storytelling.

Truth is, I like Banville more than Black, and the just-published The Blue Guitar (Knopf, $25.95) may be my favorite of his books, though it's but a trifle. It's barely a story at all, just the musings of a failed painter, Oliver Otway Orme, who has retreated to his boyhood home in Ireland after blowing up his world via an affair with Polly, the wife of his best friend, watchmaker Marcus.

Oliver is an unreliable, solipsistic and generally dreadful fellow, ugly inside and (if we are to believe his self-descriptions) out, who perversely prides himself on his lifelong habit of thievery, the taking of things of little or (in the case of Polly) great consequence. The point is for the victim to feel the pain of loss, while never knowing who inflicted it, which stimulates in Oliver a transitory feeling of possession. Mainly he's a vile old codger, full of complaint and bile. He can be funny, but never redeemed.

But the real pleasures of the book have little to do with Oliver's comically self-aware observations of the world (which is, like the reflection in a mirror or paint arrayed on canvas, not at all the thing itself) but with Banville's tidy and accurate way of handling rare and exotic words, some of which -- haruspicating, rubious, autochthons -- are all but extinct, living on only in the working vocabularies of tweedy dons and desperately deep readers.

You might congratulate yourself for recognizing the title as a reference to the Wallace Stevens poem "The Man with the Blue Guitar," which Oliver quotes when he says he gave up painting. He couldn't abide the valley between what he captured and what was there:

I cannot bring a world quite round,

Although I patch it as I can.

Every artist must know that unbridgeable chasm. Benjamin Black might be able to avert his eyes, but Banville has to try to stare it down.

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Style on 10/04/2015

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