Best Guide to Bangkok - a Novel by John Burdett
Once Again, it Takes a Novelist to Get Under the Skin of a City
Aug 30, 2008
There are guides aplenty to Bangkok, its nightlife, clubs, and city government, but few come anywhere close to giving the reader the experience of Bangkok.
Bangkok Haunts however, the most recent book by John Burdett, fills in the gaps nicely. Anyone who wants to know Bangkok’s sleazier side, and how this is reconciled with the strong Buddhist beliefs of the people, would be rewarded by reading this new book by John Burdett. It features the policeman familiar from earlier books, Detective Sonchai Jitpleechep.
Books by John Burdett
Anyone who has read Burdett’s earlier two Bangkok crime stories featuring the same detective, Bangkok Eight and Bangkok Tattoo, will already be familiar with the characters, Sonchai the detective, his mother the owner of a brothel, and the girls who work in the red-light districts of Patpong, Soi Cowboy and Nana Plaza. All three books deal with the major and minor corruptions that are a way of life in Thailand, the resilience of the Thai people and their strong Buddhist faith. All three novels have at their centre a disturbing and horrific murder. Bangkok Haunts hangs on a snuff movie.
Life in Thailand
Regular visitors to Thailand and residents of the country will be familiar with many of the situations that crop up in the book, but it is the ease with which they are introduced, the unselfconscious way in which Burdett introduces unfamiliar Thai words yet doesn’t slow down the dialogue by translating them there and then, that moves the plot along so smoothly and keeps the reader glued to the page.
About the Author, John Burdett
John Burdett is English by birth, a lawyer familiar with the Far East, and obviously, very familiar with Thailand. His books are meticulously researched. His cop, Sonchai, is a half-Thai, half-American non-corrupt Buddhist, but he is a far cry from the clean-cut, American cop who defeats the wicked while defending the poor and working 24/7 without sleep! Sonchai is all too human. His partner in this new book, Lek, is awaiting a sex-change operation, and his reasons are explained with compassion and insight.
About the Novel
During the course of the novel the reader is taken through the haunts of the Thai prostitutes, the offices of the local police and the corrupt Immigration Police on the border with Cambodia, the back streets of Phnom Penh where violence is matter of course and the haunts of members of Bangkok’s HiSo (High Society) whose efforts to protect their identities, is at the centre of the plot.
All three novels are ironic and sexy. They can inspire horror and disgust, delight and fascination in equal portions. Many parts may shock, but the writing is strangely poetic. One sentence from the latest book may explain more about Thailand than a hundred guide books.
“There is no tragedy that compares to an interminable tomorrow without rice”.
 |
 |
