On the frontier

Roger Garside, New Society (UK) , April 1986

When James Spenser left school he had two obsessions: a love of beautiful things and the dilemma of what to do with his love. At 32 he was already Deputy Keeper at the Victoria and Albert, devoting his working day to Indian and Burmese art. But being a curator of beautiful things was not enough. He must own them. He must be free to touch them, to hold them at will, as if he were their lover. It was, as Cocteau said, all a question of sex.

At Pagan on the Irrawaddy, 5,000 temples, ruined but still rich in statuary, beckoned to him. The rest of the novel deals with his attempt to steal 20 of the finest Buddhas in the Ananda Pagoda.

This is a thriller, but in the mode of Conrad. Like that master of the modern novel, of whom he is a frank admirer, the author is fascinated by power play. Spenser launches his raid into Burma from the Thai side of the Golden Triangle and there he has to deal with rival armies engaged in drug traffic, smuggling and the Shan nationalist insurrections, as well as a 30,000 strong anti-communist Chinese army still living China’s civil war, and the Thai army. Ralston Saul, who developed his powers of political analysis writing a doctoral thesis on de Gaulle, conveys well the curious mixture of restraint and ruthlessness that shapes their struggle.

The people who will make Spenser’s project succeed or fail come from all the many varieties in the Golden Triangle and Bangkok. They live on a frontier between the middle ages and modern society. They fit no categories. Being no stranger to these parts, I can testify that Ralston Saul has caught their likeness well.

After raiding Pagan, Spenser and his armed party must make a long, slow trek back through the jungle of the Shan states. Their mules are laden with statues, they are harassed by hostile forces, and the monsoon has begun early. But the struggle is not just physical: even more, it becomes religious and moral. Day after day Spenser must face Buddhists in his party who are wracked by guilt at the sacrilege they have committed. He must live with the fact that final success depends on an extraordinary American who is the effective leader of his party, Mathew Blake, half-missionary, half-guerilla leader who seeks to bring order to the anarchy of the jungle and of the Shan states, with a righteous brutality unthinkable in South Kensington.

Conrad would have relished this climax, but he would have counseled the author not to let his love of action push his pen too fast.