Surprisingly moving bits on wounded love and disrespected friendship flesh out a thoroughly frightening and foreign...
Paternal love grapples with opium dreams in a sharp, short, and terrifying adventure: the latest from this four-time winner of the British Fantasy Award (Indigo, 2000, etc.).
The only things going well in the life of fearfully smart but unlettered London electrician Dan Innes are the wiring, at which he’s very good, and the pub quizzes, at which he and his teammates are nearly unbeatable. Dan’s wife Sheila has left him, his son Phil has become rabidly evangelical, and now comes word that Charlie, his multiply pierced Oxford graduate daughter, from whom he has not heard in two years, has been locked up for drug smuggling in Thailand. It’s a horrible fate, but not surprising. Once the light of his life, Charlie had a spectacularly rebellious adolescence, and her fights with her old dad were killers, but who cares about old quarrels now? She’s in the worst possible trouble, and Dan will do anything to get her out. Anything, in this case, means flying to a country he knows nothing about to do battle with a government that could not care less how much he loved the child Charlie once was. Oddly enough, Dan’s quiz teammate Mick, a gregarious bachelor whose friendship has been lightly regarded, insists on coming along. He bulls his way into the action, in fact, bringing all his savings with him. And Phil, the mopey joylessly Christian son, comes too. The Chiang Mai jail is but the first stop in a hair-raising search that takes the discordant trio miles and miles into the Thai-Burmese borderland—where opium flows like water, where the law is a laugh, and where Charlie lies in a hallucinatory cell, possibly mad, definitely addicted. The Londoners find themselves de facto prisoners of the local druglord, and the possibility of a quick and safe escape seems more remote by the minute. Blood will flow, and inner resources will be tested.
Surprisingly moving bits on wounded love and disrespected friendship flesh out a thoroughly frightening and foreign adventure.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-671-03939-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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