Bangkok
8
Marketed as a mystery, the book is definitely that. It opens with one of the all-time great murders: a locked-car set-up using exotic weaponry of a kind you won’t run across in Sue Grafton, or Elmore Leonard. To say more than that plot-wise would be to destroy the surprises Burdett has in store for you. More than a mere mystery novel (yes, there’s murder and yes, the villain, who’s actually sort of a good guy, is identified, more or less), Bangkok 8 is also:  The ultimate insider’s
guide to Bangkok. Do NOT read this book if you, when traveling, stake your life
on Lonely Planet’s guidebooks. Burdett convincingly takes you to places in Bangkok
far beyond footnotes or even the latest online additions to Lonely Planet, places so
remote and bizarre that your mother, even in her nightmares, never imagined you’d
wind up.A
workbook of problems in applied Buddhism, a guide to practical karma in daily
life, a DIY manual for staying on the Eightfold Path during rush hour.An
Auntie Mame for the 21st century, featuring a mother-son duo
whose origins and antics lie somewhere beyond "unlikely," but who are every bit
as entertaining, unpredictable, and—pardon the expression—endearing as Mame and
Patrick ever were.A
print roller coaster that you have no idea where it’s going or whether the
next turn is going up or down, left or right. All you know is it’s a great ride and
you don’t want it to end.A
metaphysical Thai version of a BBC news report: "…and the REAL news of
the REAL world—the one that Westerners can’t see and think doesn’t
exist—is…"
That makes the book sound too messy and phantasmagorical. Well. It IS, like life, messy and phantasmagorical. But it is also a good story well-told. After the amazing opening murder scene, here come de Bangkok cops. Our hero and guide for what happens next is a detective named Sonchai plus one of those last names that cause Western eyes to glaze over. Sonchai is as unlikely a Thai cop as the story he’s about to tell us. He’s six feet, blond, blue-eyed, speaks Thai, German, French, Italian, and a half-Brit half-American version of English. Sonchai’s mother, a Thai beauty named Nong (Mame to his Patrick), you see, made her way in the world through her wits and her beauty, producing along the way Sonchai and enough money to raise and educate him properly. Widely known in the Royal Thai Police both as a star detective and as the only Bangkok cop who won’t take a bribe, Sonchai is a practicing Buddhist. Putting it like that is almost like saying Jesus was a practicing Christian. When unsure about where to turn next in his investigation, Sonchai is given to meditation (sometimes in the most unlikely circumstances), which is also his favorite method of dropping out of unpleasant conversations. Along the roller-coaster way to solving the murder, Sonchai hears voices, encounters apparitions, has visions of the past and future with such frequency and such a sense of NORMALITY that Bangkok 8 at times makes you realize what a primitive crack in the old cosmic egg the much-praised "magical realism" of certain 20th century writers was. Call what John Burdett is doing here Metaphysical Realism. If you ask what’s Bangkok 8 about, sure it’s "about" a mystery. In a larger sense, it’s about prostitution. The title refers to the police district where Sonchai works and which is the heart of the Thai skin trade. (One assumes the title is also a play on Butterfield 8, which gave Elizabeth Taylor her chance to chew the scenery as girl-gone-astray-but-with-heart-of-gold.) The Lonely Planet guides will point to a street and tell you, OK, if you want fun-and-games, go there. John Burdett takes you down those streets, introduces you to the people working there, shows the how-why-and-wherefore of Bangkok’s famous sex industry. Then he takes you one step—actually several steps—farther toward an understanding of the larger, global meaning of prostitution, first as sex, but then, beyond sex, as the kind of self-for-sale paradigm that is, he suggests, the keystone of this Late Capitalist era. Again I’m making the book sound too serious, too heavy. Bangkok 8 is a wild, crazy, entertaining, funny, frightening ride through a great city—which Sonchai at one point describes as "our Oriental Democracy of Flesh"—where the twain have met and mingled and co-mingled in all possible configurations and at all possible rates of exchange, to the great benefit and the great pain of all concerned. "Picaresque" doesn’t begin to describe this book. What is the poor helpless reviewer to do with a story featuring: a beautiful retired prostitute who
begins studying the Wall Street Journal online via her broadband connection in the Thai
outback and comes up with a business model for what she calls "The Old
Men’s Club," a brothel for elderly males, each of whom upon entry is
given a free hit of Viagra.a
baby crocodile named "Bill Gates."a
character whose gender adventures take him/her beyond where even Myra Breckinridge
dared to go.euthanasia
by orgasm.a
plot that, if you go along with it, gets you to a place where, when one of the Thai
characters dismisses the West as "a labyrinth of apparent choices leading to
a dead end," you find yourself nodding in stunned agreement.a
villain who gets a karmic comeuppance of such vast cosmic wisdom that it makes
Solomon seem a piker judgement-wise.
Near the end of this irresistibly seductive fictional ride, when another character offhandedly observes that Western logic is "the biggest superstition since the virgin birth," don’t be surprised if you find a blissed-out grin spreading across your face. And somewhere, in some distant fictive universe that may turn out to be realer than the one we call home, Myra Breckinridge herself is surely smiling by the time Burdett takes us onto his last, it-ain't-over-till-it's-over page. END
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"The walls [of the American embassy in Bangkok] are
massive reinforced concrete, capable of withstanding an assualt by a ten-wheel truck, and
if the truck did succeed in breaching the walls, there is a moat. In the twenty-first
century the American ambassador works in a medival castle. What is the karma of
America?"
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If Graham Greene had smoked dope—a whole lot of
dope—he MIGHT have been able to produce a book like John Burdett’s Bangkok 8.
