Black Comedy in Bangkok

The Paradise Eater, of John Ralston Saul: from exotic adventure to moral tale.

Josyane Savigneau, Le Monde (Paris), 22 December 1988

Those who by desire or by force of events will not be spending Christmas with their families and would like to divert their attention from the celebrations ought perhaps to spend the evening of December 24th with John Ralston Saul and his The Paradise Eater – a beautiful title to describe how hell has installed itself in Bangkok.

The “guide” who John Ralston Saul has chosen to unveil this octopus-like city is called John Field: a prototype of the weak man, ex-journalist converted into temporary businessman, who has cut himself off from all his origins and decided never to leave Bangkok, where he has been living for twenty years. He has not once, not even for a short visit, returned “home,” to the West. “For me, life has nothing to do with success,” he says. “I suppose that’s why I left North America.” Field suffers from what we might call the Bangkok sickness – a banal venereal disease so well installed that antibiotics can’t get it out.

On a business trip to Laos, to Vientiane, Field finds himself caught up against his will in the terrible assassination of two of his friends. The crime is tied to the drug business. Arrested, Field escapes back to Thailand by swimming across the Mekong. Then begins, between him and those who believe that he knows too much, a pitiless race and chase. But it would be wrong to believe that John Ralston Saul, in The Paradise Eater, is simply suggesting that you should follow Field around an anecdotal skeleton. In his novel a multitude of people cross paths – without the reader ever being able to say that they are secondary – out of which crowd appears above all the enigmatic figure, complex and moving, of Dr. Michael Woodward – but he must be left to the pleasure of the reader to discover.

And since the city herself is THE character, with her incredible interlacings of sex and of violence, of white “immigrants,” often Anglo-Saxon, holding on desperately to their delinquent existence in this singular “paradise,” or rather this “paradisal hell,” if you want to give to this “lost” city all of her ambiguity.

John Ralston Saul excels, in this fourth novel, the most accomplished of them all, in rendering, without a hint of cheap exoticism, the Eastern adventure. This young-looking forty-year-old, English Canadian, knows the Far East well. Having abandoned a career – in finance and industry – to give himself to his two passions, travel and writing, John Ralston Saul spends several months each year in Bangkok. Those who know the city will recognize in The Paradise Eater, the city such as she was before AIDS had become a daily obsession.

You cannot escape from Bangkok in The Paradise Eater. Captured by Saul’s rhythm, held by his story with its rebounds so numerous that you cannot see them coming, you find yourself engulfed to the point of nausea – not metaphoric – in the low life of this flooded city, moving past the obscene dancing of the bars and on to the “Foundation for the Unreclaimed Dead” and on from there to the blood-filled slaughterhouse where the pigs are put to death all through the night crying out with their human sounds

John Ralston Saul, who does not distain brutality in his writing, will nevertheless convince those who detest it and have not allowed themselves to be impressioned by the force of his descriptions. He has turned The Paradise Eater into a moral tale. Beneath the violence of Bangkok, between the jolts which fill John Field’s destiny, there is sketched out, without ever being insistent, a reflection on the emotions of exile and those of decadence. And perhaps swimming to the surface of all this, a silent way is made in the murky waters of the permanence of love. John Ralston Saul is not one of those who thrust forward insistently their morality. The reader remains free to dream their own paradise blues. As for the author, he insists, deliciously, on that extremely Anglo-Saxon art of understatement and euphemism.