Adventures of a private detective in Bangkok
Written: Aug 18 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: The topography and the inhabitants of the seamiest parts of Bangkok are described evocatively.
Cons: The story's structure is marred by the use of an external omniscient narrator.
The Bottom Line: It is a rather routine private-detective story rescued from mediocrity by the fascinating description of low-life in Bangkok.
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| johngo's Full Review: Cold Hit Books |
In one of the upper circles of Dante's Hell, there is a place devoted to the punishment of lust. It is a place of complete freedom, the freedom to indulge in joyless, commercial sex, where you get exactly what you pay for. Afterwards you always discover that this is not what you really wanted. To add to the hellishness the women are small, fine-boned, beautiful, with delicate, flowerlike faces and lovely hair. The sinners are big, fat, hairy, sweating, tourists with baseball caps and polyester Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts. It is the collison of money and poverty, beauty and ugliness. It is a truly horrible place, Hell on Earth: a district of Bangkok.
Bangkok is a capital city of prostitution, where sex is bought by the hour from poor and beautiful young women who cannot make money in any other way. It is bought by an infestation of sex-tourists, the kind of beastly men who do not seek loving relationships, but simply require convenient orifices---Take your pick---in which to ejaculate their sperm. Only the juxtaposition of great wealth and the most wretched poverty can allow endemic prostitution to persist: that is what made Victorian London, and makes contemporary Bangkok seethe with prostitutes.
The streets of Bangkok are the meaner streets where Vincent Calvino carries out his trade as a private investigator. I suppose that Calvino is the distant literary descendant of Philip Marlowe, the tarnished good man of pre-war Los Angeles, but Calvino has some disadvantages. He doesn't tell his own story and though his dialogue is sporadically witty, the novel cannot sustain the narrative vigour that makes classic the tough-guy writing of Chandler, and indeed without his sparkling style, the sordidness of Marlowe's Los Angeles would induce a corresponding gloom.
Calvino is an old-hand expatriate who has lived in Thailand long enough to have learnt to speak the language and to have learnt something about the view of the world of the people of Thailand, buddhists, whose moral and spiritual life is remote from anything that we experience in the west. His place in the society is the intermediary who sees the pathological collisions of the Thai and American societies. The American son of a Jewish mother and a Roman Catholic Italian father, Calvino is well placed to understand the margins of more than one society. Within the context of the hellish world he occupies he is a man of integrity; despite this he will buy a girl for the night, and expecting her to to try to steal from him, he will scatter talcum powder on the floor of his room to track her footprints in the morning.
With a multitude of unsavoury Americans and Europeans, farangs, in Bangkok, indulging in drugs and sexual excess, it is not surprising that some get into trouble with criminals, and some with the police, facts that make an intermediary such as Calvino valuable both to American authorities searching for citizens who have visited Thailand and failed to return, and to Thai authorities, repatriating those Americans who have rendered themselves penniless and in need of charity.
Calvino keeps a professional eye on crimes involving farangs, and has noticed a number of deaths of American men, all from overdoses of heroin, the bodies being discovered otherwise unharmed, with belongings intact, events most unlikely to have occurred by chance in Bangkok. The men had all had one thing in common, they belonged to an internet club, The Cause, which has to do with comparison-shopping for sex in Bangkok. The police do not see the connexion that Calvino does.
Cold Hit begins with Calvino delivering a card from a besotted farang to his call-girl mistress on her birthday. It is an odd assignment: the fee offered is disproportionately large, and consequently Calvino is doubtful about accepting it, but he does. In the evening of the birthday he sits in his car watching the door of her apartment building waiting for the girl to leave for work. He delivers the card and is immediately attacked from behind, and has his nose broken and his eye blacked.
Despite looking totally wrecked, the following morning Calvino is hired to become one of two bodyguards of a visiting American, Wes Naylor, a lawyer, the owner of The Cause, who is visiting Thailand to complete the purchase of an hotel in Bangkok, which is being bought to accommodate sex-tourists belonging to his club. The other bodyguard is Jess Santisak, on leave from the Los Angeles Police Department, a Thai, normally resident in America. The bodyguards are required because Naylor has received death threats from people who do not wish the sale of the hotel to take place.
The major strength of the novel is that it portrays an alien society seen from the margins. The action moves about Bangkok and conveys a sense of a city half-built, but already semi-derelict, with many buildings incomplete but dilapidated, the detritus of a massive stock market slump. It depicts the society made up of a vast immigrating population of peasants, filling the poorest most desolate slums, and the minute minority of the untouchable rich corrupting all kinds of authority with their wealth, a society made feverish by the infection of the brutish sex-tourists.
The construction of the novel is weakened by the third party omniscient narration. Calvino has a couple of dreams which are unconvincing in their concreteness and coherence: they do not resemble my dreams or the dreams of anybody else I have ever spoken to. The narrator also describes the internal states of mind of various characters: the states, of mind, especially of the Thai people, are unconvincingly described, commonplace, and damage the thrust of the narrative, which depends on the perceptions and understanding of the protagonist. In general the best private-eye novels are first person narratives, or narratives constructed by the trusty Dr Watson figure, with a fixed point of view and no direct access to the mental states of any of the other characters. Obviously, different conventions are implied by both these styles of narrative, but they both avoid describing conversations in which the words and the mental processes of the persons involved are displayed at the same time, when, for example, one speaker is attempting to deceive another.
The prose of the narration shifts awkwardly from rather flat description of exteriors and events to wise-cracking wit, the kind of thing that you would expect Calvino to say. A forlorn trick that the author resorts to more than once is the comparison of fictional events in films or novels with the real events supposedly being described in his own story. This ploy simply draws attention to the fictional nature of the narrative that makes the references.
An engaging feature of Philip Marlowe is his sharp eye and his precise description. Chandler could find fugitive beauty in the commonplace, even the sordid, but Moore does not. A final gripe: every time Calvino's gun is referred to it is referred to as a '.38 Police Special', which I suppose is a short-barrelled revolver. Words such as 'gun' or 'pistol' would have provided unobtrusive variation.
The action is exciting, the plot is intricate, but what makes the novel worth reading is the convincing, realistic description of what it is like for farangs, exploited and exploiting, to live in the sexual Hell of contemporary Bangkok.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
johngo
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Member: John Ollason
Location: Scotland
Reviews written: 83
Trusted by: 61 members
About Me:
I used to work at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, a lecturer in ecology.
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