Knaves in Thailand

Evelyn Toynton, The New York Review of Books, 1 January 1989

Like so many characters in modern fiction, John Field, the protagonist of John Ralston Saul’s new novel, expects very little from life and appears to believe in absolutely nothing. If he’d been created by Graham Greene – and “The Paradise Eater” certainly has elements in common with a Graham Greene novel – he’d at least be God-haunted, struggling with the absence of grace. But Field, a Canadian-born former journalist who’s lived in Bangkok for 20 years and supports himself by negotiating import-export deals for the business community there, is only trying to get by as painlessly as possible in a world he accepts as irredeemably corrupt. “Cynicism was one of his easy comforts,” Mr. Saul tells us, and for other forms of comfort he frequents the numerous brothels of the city, where he picks up increasingly stubborn strains of venereal disease. This might serve as a metaphor for his relationship to Thailand itself, whose whores are touchingly innocent compared to the drug lords in control of its armies and its Government. The sheer venality of the atmosphere in which Field operates seems to have sapped him of any will toward meaning.

Even when his first love, a Canadian woman he hasn’t seen in two decades, is brutally murdered by the drug dealers, he experiences no great moral outrage or desire for vengeance. Although he’s sickened by the sight of her and her husband’s mutilated bodies – he’s the one to discover them, by accident, during a business trip to Laos – he’s perfectly willing to keep silent if the perpetrators will just leave him alone. They suspect, however, that he, like the murdered man, may know too much about their heroin trafficking with the Communist Government of Laos, and so they keep trying to kill him both before and after his return to Bangkok.

The tale of how Field keeps eluding their assassins and tracks down the ringleader of the drug traders seems a little mechanical at times, like a rehash of various other thrillers, and the reader will have guessed the identity of the ringleader before Field does. Yet that hardly even matters: “The Paradise Eater” remains consistently fascinating, mostly for its voluptuous detailed depiction of the life of Bangkok. Whether Mr. Saul is describing an English-style dinner party or a grossly self-satisfied English novelist ogling the nude dancers in a seedy bar, a meeting with the drug lords’ tame banker or a retarded boy rescuing his neighbors’ possessions from a burning slum, he conveys such a sense of decadence and moral rot on the one hand and fierce vitality and sorrow on the other that it doesn’t seem to matter who’s chasing whom through the flooded, traffic-clogged streets of the city.

We even get one full-fledged hero: a witty, mournful doctor, half Thai and half English-Jewish, who spends much of his life ministering to Bangkok’s poor. In one of the most powerful scenes of the novel, the workers in a slaughterhouse surround a thug who’s come in search of Field and butcher him as they’ve just been butchering the pigs because he threatens their beloved doctor with his gun. And then there’s the doctor’s 96-year-old father, a retired admiral, who excoriates the victors in the recent coup at his birthday party, swearing to kill them with his own hands if they don’t release his son from prison.

“The Paradise Eater” would be still better than it is if Field himself had some of that passion – if he even got savagely ironic at times, more emphatically disenchanted with the world. But “I want to go back to my boring little life where I happily plod along not getting what I want,” he says in the midst of his troubles – just when we’d like him to be having all sorts of epiphanies. Despite the ecstatic last lines of “Kubla Khan” that serve as the book’s epigraph, Field remains obdurately uninspired.

Mr. Saul, the author of three previous novels, does try to give him some emotional resonance by showing the residue of romance at his core: Field buys a 17-year-old Thai prostitute who’s riddled with venereal disease from the brothel that can no longer use her, and the story of the growing tenderness between these two disease-damaged people is woven throughout the book. Unfortunately, though, there’s something a little flat and perfunctory about the way it’s presented, as though the author had consciously seized on this device because he knew that every world-weary character worth his salt must have a lonely streak of sentiment.

Meanwhile, his best energies are elsewhere – in the streets of Bangkok, or out in the surrounding countryside, where the former prostitute who owns many of the city’s brothels has just built a golf course and a contemplation center for monks side by side. Mr. Saul has a positive genius for this kind of juxtaposition, and for making us feel the feverish, hypnotic quality of the country that has Field in thrall. It’s possible to believe, by the book’s conclusion, that Thailand is the Paradise of the title after all, and so it seems only fitting that Field should be forced to leave it in the end. Expelled to the tepid sanity of Canada, he and the young Thai prostitute, whom he’s married to get her out of the country, bring with them their incurable ailments – a legacy from the polluted Eden they’re likely to mourn for the rest of their lives.