LIFE IN A “MAGIC-RAVAGED LAND”

Bangkok Haunts

By John Burdett

Alfred A. Knopf, June 2007

Once you go ghost, you never go back.

 

             So it would seem to the list of johns obsessed with a dead prostitute (given the name “Damrong”, which to Western ears carries a phonetic double-entendre to it) so brutalized by (and disgusted with) life that she has become a demon tormenting them from the Other Side. One of these tormented tricks narrates Bangkok Haunts, the third in a series of Thai crime novels penned by British expatriate and ex-barrister John Burdett, which have garnered international acclaim and taken sleaze to an almost lyrical new level.

 

             The john in question is Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep of the Royal Thai Police Force, an incorruptible arhat cop who defies convention by refusing bribes. He is also, arguably, the most opinionated, sardonic, and prescient critic of modern Western civilization pontificating from the fiction shelves today.

You could almost call him a modern Juvenal, though Sonchai himself would likely resent being compared to a leech on the ancient Roman party circuit who knew nothing of the Buddha.

             So concise is Sonchai’s Therevada-tinged view of modernity that he (like all good critics) has a catchphrase for it: “functional barbarism”. Responding from the ether to an online Q&A, Sonchai’s creator offered morsels of enlightenment. “’Functional barbarism’ is Sonchai’s epithet for the modern age, globalism in the most general sense,” Burdett explained. “We Westerners tend to think of ourselves as humane, sensitive, educated, enlightened, generous, only wanting the best for the Third World, etc. To Sonchai this is grotesque nonsense. Behind the undoubted success of applied science, our motives are essentially barbaric, and as a consequence we are producing a barbaric world driven by greed and militarism, despite all our good intentions.” In the bloody wake of Marxism, Burdett offers the bloodless and otherworldly Theravada creed as a vehicle for achieving the proper critical distance from which to critique capitalism.

 

             Naturally, this may sound quaintly duplicitous coming as it does from a character literally wallowing in the mulch of corruption endemic to the Thai culture of compassion (not to mention the endless, grinding poverty which inspires it). While critics have placed Sonchai’s tales in the so-called “neo-noir” genre, the novels share a common theme of bemusement and disgust with an alien (i.e. Western) culture which has so thoroughly altered the physical world. It is no surprise that Sonchai and his cohorts seek refuge in an older, “pre-industrial” spirituality which provides solace and guidance in this new culture of mediocrity, hypocrisy, and greed (which considers Sonchai’s camp equally alien, as voiced repeatedly by Burdett’s western characters, all of whom are portrayed as fragmented losers come to Krung Thep to escape themselves). Not that the Thais are without their own flaws; Sonchai lives in a pyramidal world of feudal relationships, where modern conveniences like motorcycles and cell phones are mere punctuation marks in a text dating back millennia. The social stagnation this has caused in Thailand is glossed over with a rationale bordering on aloofness—police corruption is likened to tax relief, prostitution to farm subsidies. The cycle of moral debt (gatdanyu),  to say nothing of the physical debt incurred at birth by the legions of the poor, is akin to self-imposed slavery. Indeed, many of Burdett’s villains, like his heroes, are dirt poor, who escape anonymity and early death only by fully embracing the most hideous extremes of the skin trade; if they survive, they are transmogrified into something inhuman, whose sole purpose is to exact hideous revenge on the world which so brutalized them. (Burdett is not squeamish when it comes to describing the violence known all too well to Southeast Asians—execution by elephants, poisonous snakes and ritual flayings, as well as the more mundane modern methods of  knife, gun and bomb, have all featured in the Sonchai series.)

 

             For all its historical immobility, Burdett sees modern Thailand as being in a state of flux, perhaps even a resignation that change is required. “There was a revolution here last year, and nothing but debate about structural change ever since,” he said. “There are many reasons why Thailand is in a state of transition, one of them being a stronger independence amongst women. This is not generally feminism – Asian women tend voluntarily to adhere to a ‘feminine’ identity and eschew what they see as ‘mannishness’ – so much as a sense that the old structures are not working and cannot be made to apply to a modern state when they are almost exclusively the product of an agricultural society.

 

“To Buddhist eyes, the whole construct of modern society, which of course includes the modern parts of Asia, is based not only on illusion in the sense that the material world is a mere trick of perspective, but on a kind of moral illusion,” Burdett explained. Sonchai actually prefers prostitution to pornography, an argument in favor of human contact  and a venerable homegrown industry whereby a poor country’s young can support its even more impoverished old . This seems almost a prerequisite for creating a character like Sonchai in a country which, by International Labour Organization estimates, has a sex worker population anywhere from 65,000 to 365,000.  According to the US State Department’s 2006 report on human trafficking, Thailand was ranked in Tier Two as “a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of sexual exploitation and forced labor”, although there are almost no figures given in support of this.  This isn’t lost on Burdett’s American FBI character Kimberley Jones; she seems to serve as an interlocutor for Sonchai’s implacable defense of the Thai sex industry. (Sonchai’s now-pregnant mate, Chanya, is a former prostitute whose story fleshed out Burdett’s previous book, Bangkok Tattoo (2005), in which both she and Sonchai’s mother Nong artfully presented the Thai sex trade as a kind of Third World analogue to America’s “volunteer” army.)

 

If the sex trade provides the constant backdrop for Burdett’s novels, there is another, more variable one for each book. This second scrim has hitherto been a criminal plague in Southeast Asia (in contrast to prostitution). In the first novel to feature Sonchai (Bangkok 8, 2003), it was the jade trade; in Bangkok Tattoo, it was drugs. In this book it is porn, perhaps the hardiest commodity of the pre-digital age to be adapted easily (and with staggering financial results) to the wireless world. It’s almost enough to make one nostalgic for old-fashioned stroke magazines, where at least there was some tactile connection to that obscure object of desire. “I think to Sonchai, porn is simply part of the ‘functional barbarism’ of our times – an abuse of applied science which allows us to cop out emotionally, and even erotically,” Burdett said. “That’s why he prefers prostitution.”

 

This is quite glaring in light of one of the new book’s central plotlines, about the explosion of the porn industry along wireless streams of digital media. Burdett seemingly derived the entire novel around a New York Times article from 2000  about the involvement of international hotel chains helping the porn industry swell to unprecedented size—sorry—by contracting with pornographers to pipe their product into pay-per-view networks, tapping into a massive global market of johns which provides total privacy with no risks (of disease or pregnancy, let alone hickeys or foreign lipstick and perfume traces). “Porn is a massive growth industry because digital media permits it to be viewed in secret,” Burdett stated. The Times article, which itself has cameos at the beginning and end of the book, allows the unflappable Sonchai to create a logical loophole through which he can comfortably achieve safe distance from the porn industry, which he ties directly to the central murder case in the book, as well as to the western culture he despises while grudgingly conceding its massive reach: “It’s destroying the world, haven’t you noticed?” (Strategically, Burdett stages a conversation within the first 100 pages in which Sonchai, with true lawyer’s aplomb, effortlessly parries Jones’ queries along these exact lines.)

 

Of course, porn applied to Burdett’s view of Thailand is not merely restricted to the living. While he is certainly not the first author to inject strong religious themes into a western literary subgenre—the detective novel—(William Hjortsberg, Orhan Pamuk), his inclusion of supernatural scenarios and characters amidst a painfully modernizing Third World backdrop has created a lively hybrid which exerts a healthy draw amongst jaded farang readers (his books regularly debut in the nether regions of the New York Times bestseller list and garner warm pre- and post-publication reviews in the West). Perhaps his most effective tactic is repeatedly tying the dead to the living at the sexual level (Sonchai, as well as Damrong’s other marks, is sexually tormented by her ghost to the point of insanity, a form of punishment which retains the flavor of Thai Theravada and Khmer paganism while titillating readers of just about any living market—another nod to porn’s ability to crest all barriers). Burdett’s ghosts have quite a bone to pick (sorry again) with the living, stealing into their bedrooms, lurking in taxicabs , possessing mediums  and monks  alike. While Chanya scolds Sonchai for trysting with the dead, even he, with the status of a Buddhist arhat, is not immune to the lures of supernatural sex: “Men, let me be frank, there is no erotic experience that compares to being fucked by a ghost.” This is the Thailand Burdett has so clearly fallen for, his “magic-ravaged land,” as his equally smitten FBI character texts to Sonchai mid-swoon  (though the phrase itself is a vocal echo from Bangkok 8). In Bangkok Haunts, ghosts even wind up doing porn of their own, no mean feat.  “Ghosts form an extremely important part of local culture, and it is literally very difficult to find a Thai woman who has not seen at least one in her life,” Burdett said. “Men are slightly more reticent but will come clean under questioning: ghosts are everywhere. My problem, though, was that I had not – and still have not – come across any myself. So I made them up and saw no reason why my ghosts should not have a hi-tech dimension.” Apparently, porn even keeps the dead coming back for more. As for the living—once you go ghost…

 

 

 

 

Obviously, Burdett doesn’t  obfuscate his own  origins. In fact, his pedigree has been somewhat imparted to his creation, increasing Sonchai’s already mystical affectation. Sonchai is the product of a tryst between a Vietnam-era US soldier and a Thai prostitute. Dismayed and disgusted with the culture that liberally takes it pleasure with his own on all levels (“It’s a culture of hypocrisy,” Sonchai explains to his boss, the wonderful police gangster Colonel Vikorn, who could teach Deadwood’s Al Swearengen a trick or two), Sonchai is able to comfortably straddle the twin hypocrisies of being a cop on a force which rivals only the Thai military in the scope of its criminal activities, as well as working management in his mother’s brothel.