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More reviews by Wayne E. Yang
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Bangkok Tattoo by John Burdett
When corrupt Thai police officer Sonchai first hears that one of his best prostitutes has been found with the mutilated corpse of a "John", he is not overly bothered. "Killing your customers just isn't good for business," warns his Mom (who happens also to be the madam), but Sonchai's boss Police Colonel Vikorn has a gift for coverups. The problem is that this is not your ordinary corpse, and this is no ordinary "John". The body, they learn, has been flayed. Worse yet, the body is that of CIA agent Mitch Turner. His friends are due to come around and ask questions.
JOHN BURDETT drags us into an imagined Thai underworld with humor and verve in his novel BANGKOK TATTOO. Burdett's tale works in Viagra; tattoos; the inside out of running a prostitution business; a drug rivalry between the army and police, and transgender katoeys (who, we are told, "are as Thai as lemongrass"). This is also a Post-9/11 world where the United States sees enemies under every rock. Burdett enjoys skewering the naivete of the United States, which is "old, gridlocked, overtaxed, overgoverned, more overarmored than Tyrannosaurus rex, and too hidebound for any dramatic expansion."
"This is the problem with the West, it is childishly superficial," says an army general. "Create a system that resembles theirs, no matter how defective and corrupt, and they praise you. Create a different system, and they try to undermine you. So what the cops have so cleverly produced is a police state that looks like a democracy. No wonder farang love us. It's their system exactly."
Adds another character, in a direct barb to the Iraq War: "Indeed, the world is so much easier to exploit when it is at war."
CIA agent Mitch Turner is supposed to embody this simplistic-thinking United States. We are told the story of his relationship with the prostitute Chanya through a series of flashbacks, and Chanya chides Turner for following a president "who divides the world into good and evil because he can only count up to two." The diatribes come off weaker than they should, since Turner does not have the moral complexity of Graham Greene's Pyle (with whom he shares a literary kinship). Turner is fleshed out well enough, however, for a love triangle among Turner, Chanya (whose looks and loyalties seem to change like the weather) and Sonchai that drives the novel at a fast, highly-entertaining pace to its somewhat inevitable ending. Are they the only ones in love with Chanya, otherwise who is leaving bodies in his wake? There are those who will wonder whether to take Burdett seriously, whether to take offense at the novel's seeming implication that prostitution is a victimless crime, for instance.
"Missionary to [Prostitute]: 'Whatever you earn, I'll pay you the same for cleaning my condominium every morning."
"[Prostitute] (threatened, conflicted, and distressed): Couldn't we just [do it]?"
Since Burdett's satirical style comes close to a Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins or Douglas Adams, though, you are often kept wondering about how far he is trying to take things. He sets the record straight in an author's note. Any of your remaining misgivings might not be enough, however, to keep you from giving in to raucous laughter.
Wayne E. Yang
10/10/2005
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Wayne E. Yang is based in New York, where he lives with his wife and two children. His web site is www.wayneyang.com. |
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