Comrade Aeon’s Field Guide to Bangkok by Emma Larkin (Granta Books)
Comrade Aeon roams the streets of Bangkok, barefoot and ragged, searching for truth, measuring and recording the world around him in “empirical data,” that can’t be contradicted or whitewashed. His life has been reduced to a kind of invisibility. Once a teacher of history, his insistence upon honest records has ruined his career, giving him a life of “walking his songlines” and resting in a shelter made of discarded billboards. His sole possession is his collection of notebooks, filled with his observed facts.
When he was a young student rebel, he fled to Thailand’s jungle, the place where he was given a new name that reflected his passion for the past. Now he lives in a patch of jungle in the middle of Bangkok, a vacant lot filled with “verdant mesh...feeding off itself, growing out of its own decay.” Both this land and Comrade Aeon hold a buried secret, a part of Bangkok’s suppressed and laundered history.
Few people know Aeon but he is the link between vastly disparate residents of his city. A beautiful actress with whom he is obsessed is married to a real estate developer who sees Aeon’s jungle as the land that will increase the magnate’s fortune. An old woman who lives in the slum near Aeon’s refuge feeds him, gives him clean clothes, cuts his hair, and is troubled by odd dreams that are fragments of his secret. An expat wife, who feels an encroaching physical weightlessness calling her to her death, stumbles upon his hut one drunken night and gives Aeon another name, “the bonekeeper.” In her walk through the jungle she has seen bones protruding from the earth. They’ve been uncovered by the bulldozer that has begun the first stage of the developer’s project, bones that may belong to the man’s son who disappeared seventeen years before in a bloody political crackdown.
This could easily turn into the sort of soap opera that the beautiful actress has begun to write, the kind that serves as a Greek chorus, underpinning the plot of this novel. What saves it from stereotypes and banality is the beauty and the knowledge of Emma Larkin’s writing. She links the expat wife who haunts the jungle on her nightly expeditions, as “pale as a dead woman,” to “another weightless woman,” the horrifying Thai ghost called Phi Krasue. She reveals the close relationship that exists between Bangkok business interests and the underworld, and shows how rumors and gossip easily gain strength and take the place of truth. She skewers the “hi-so” world of wealthy Bangkokians with a restaurant meal in which “essence of roasted beetroot” bleeds on a plate and acknowledges the beauty of the “balletic performance” given by the city’s nonstop traffic.
Her descriptions are precise and painterly, displaying the often overlooked beauty of Thailand’s capital city: “the soft pale lotus pink” of its morning light, its night sky of “watered indigo tinted with amber...never truly dark,” the “curious shimmering light” of its river, and the “densely knit constellation” that Bangkok becomes after sunset.
This debut novel has its flaws. Larkin’s knowledge of her characters threatens to sink them in voluminous backstory details. The length of more than a few of her sentences would make readers turn blue if they tried to voice them in a single breath. These are distractions that could have been avoided with some judicious trimming. Even so, her plot soars with its originality and her evident affection for her characters keeps them afloat and alive. Of all the novels that have been written in English about Bangkok and its people, its history and culture, this is by far the best. No other writer has pierced the layers of Bangkok’s multileveled society with the insight and knowledge that this lifelong resident has brought to bear upon it. Comrade Aeon’s Field Guide to Bangkok is a literary guide that steers readers into the city’s heart without leading them astray.. ~Janet Brown