Barbarians Die in Asia

John Ralston Saul in the tradition of Greene: a black mass in Bangkok

Marie-Françoise Leclère, Le Point (Paris), 26 December 1988

Beware of John Ralston Saul: a man who begins a novel with the word schizophrenia cannot be an innocent. This Canadian gentleman of 41 years, this escapee from the world of finance and of petroleum, who chose to drop it in favour of adventure and writing, has a heavy past. From “The Birds of Prey” to “The Next Best Thing,” from his trips with mercenaries in the Burmese jungle to his articles in The Spectator, he meditates on power, instability and decadence, and rummages beneath the evil spells cast by our society. This he does with politeness, of course, that is to say while pretending to speak of other things, and even while telling stories, an Anglo-Saxon elegance learnt from his masters Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene.

In appearance therefore, “The Paradise Eater” is an adventure, a manhunt in Bangkok, written with the hand of a master. The victim, John Field, an ex-journalist who drowns his disappointments in alcohol, a collector of doubts and of diseases caught up by accident in the drug traffic between Thailand and Laos. So much for the plot. And then there is all the rest, the low bars, the killers, the prostitutes and the prophets, the devious generals, the businessmen richer than those of Manhattan, the madams beside whom Freud is an amateur, the great disorder of Asia which marches to the music of a funeral mass, sordid and joyous. And then there is the true hero, the city, a place, swampy, weighted down, sticky, alive in every detail to the most obscene, uncontrollable, profoundly incomprehensible.

The amateurs of exoticism have more than their fill. For it is the whites that the author pins up on the wall. Those who arrive in the Far East full of solutions, those who to the contrary come looking for answers to the Western malaise. Sinister “experts” or sad little children of Voltaire and of Montesquieu, they learn that Asia wears out all the calculations and all the dreams.

Because, Saul whispers to us, Asia is the land of memory and of durability, indifferent to our analyses, to our supposed order, to our way of breaking up time into a succession of problems which theoretically must be resolved immediately. “The Paradise Eater” is a moral tale. Possible subtitle: “Barbarians die in Asia.”