A novelist who transcends the thriller genre

Ken Adachi, The Toronto Star, 5 June 1988

John Ralston Saul wants to make one thing very clear. He doesn’t, as some reviewers like to claim, writer thrillers in the manner of Robert Ludlum or Frederick Forsyth with preposterous plots churning up spectacular evil and monstrous catastrophes.

“I don’t like being lumped into that genre,” Saul says. Tall, slender and 40, he takes his work seriously, and he’s been a bestselling success since The Birds of Prey caused a sensation in 1978. “The serious novelist’s role is to reflect a complex society in which people can see themselves. I write novels, not genre fiction. My novels are not ‘escapist’ fiction.”

It could be said that his new novel, The Paradise Eater, resembles Melville’s Moby Dick in that if your only interest is in the story and not in its metaphysics, you could flick from the first chapter to the last and perhaps find out who did what to whom. The author’s main concern is with what happens in between, where the society of the novel’s inhabitants – in this case, the stratified society of Bangkok – is dissected and explored.

Certainly, it’s a novel that far transcends our expectations of the thriller genre – perhaps because it sets out to fulfill Matthew Arnold’s imperative for literature, in the sense that The Paradise Eater – at least implicitly – aspires to be nothing less than a criticism of life. Among other things, Saul does attempt to create a sense of place and to make it vividly real to the reader. He also peoples it with characters who are suffering men and women, not stereotypes to be knocked down like dummies in the last chapter.

In fact, Saul, the Ottawa-born former investment and energy expert who is back living in Toronto after some years in Paris, insists his novel has no plot. “I try to create a sense of urgency and terror which, I suppose, translates into a reader turning the pages. But nothing is clarified in the end. My main character, John Field, isn’t a hero. He’s not out for justice. He’s weak, he has no strong sense of ambition.”

Field is a former Canadian journalist, occasional businessman and long-time resident of Bangkok. Sent on a seemingly innocuous business trip to Laos, he is suspected of having killed his ex-lover and her husband, who might have been involved in a vast drug-smuggling ring. He escapes custody and returns to Bangkok, where he attempts to elude a gang of assassins and make sense of what is happening to him.

It’s the details, at once grisly and theatrical, that are seductive: Bangkok’s sex-for-sale industry, massage parlors and brothels; the ongoing treatments for gonorrhea that the hapless Field is taking. Sex in this novel is definitely not an instrument of redemption but of destruction; and it soon becomes apparent that these are only the most visible metaphors for what Saul calls “the confusion and decline of society.”

Saul, though, makes no judgments. His is also nor mere tourist’s eye, as we know from his two earlier novels set partly in southeast Asia (Baraka and The Next Best Thing). In fact, he might be called an old Asia hand. “I’ve gone for a month, sometimes three months at a time, during the past 10 years. It’s where I go to drop the terrible ego of the author, to let go. It’s like drowning. Asia is like Canada turned inside out. There’s a tremendous exterior confusion and interior clarity.”

One of his characters is called Paga, once a village girl who arrived in Bangkok to work as a bar hostess for $10 a month. Now she controls 500 prostitutes and has made $20 million out of her trade. “She’s modeled after a real-life woman whom I met and who was absolutely delighted with the idea of having this large foreigner sitting in the car with her when she made the rounds of her brothels to pick up her payments. I’ve had years and years of listening to male locker-room talk, but with Paga I was talking with an expert from the other side. She understands male psychology. She makes Freud sound like a Sunday painter.”

There are some astonishing set-pieces, none perhaps more graphic than the description of an abattoir scene of ripped flesh, slashed throats and the sound of the pigs “screaming a long steady human scream.” The memory still disturbs Saul. “I’ve been with guerrillas in the jungles and felt no sense of danger. But hearing the human sounds of the pigs, with an iron hook locked in their jaws, was one of the most horrifying experiences I’ve ever had.”

Behind what Saul calls “the black comedy” of the novel, there is a looming darkness only partly assuaged by John Field’s humanity, his instinct for love (for his daughter and a young prostitute he rescues). “Although it’s a feeling that will go away, this is the first novel I’ve written with which I’m perfectly satisfied.”

Will he ever write a novel that hews more closely to a Canadian setting and theme? “Half of my next novel is set in Canada”, he responds, “but, really, I think I’ve been writing Canadian novels all my life. Think of all the writers we now have who set their books outside Canada. It’s not the setting, after all, that makes a novel Canadian.”

Among the writers he most admires are Graham Greene, Ford Maddox Ford, the Easter Europeans, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the Latin Americans. But at the same time, Saul is very enthusiastic about the quality of Canadian fiction.

The novel in Canada, he insists, “is still the central focus for ideas. It hasn’t yet abandoned public concerns, themes that have to do with questions of power and influence. One of the blocks to Canadian writing is that we must match the American, British or French schools. But our fiction is like that of the Russians, our prairie fiction should be compared to Chekhov’s stories. The novel in other Western countries, in contrast, has been pushed off the centre stage by the various electronic arts, and their novelists have withdrawn from the mainstream and moved into more private considerations and private language.”

“I totally reject the concept that serious fiction deals only with the interior life,” Saul says. “Everyone is free to do what he wants, but to reach a state in which deconstructionism and semiotics are considered to be the only reality is egotistical and short-sighted.”

The Canadian novel, to Saul’s way to thinking, is flourishing. “The number of good writers who’ve found a public outside Canada is truly astonishing and, with the exception of Robertson Davies, they are all relatively young. On a per capita or even an absolute basis, there are, for example, more Canadians known outside of Canada than there are French writers known outside France.”