THE YOUNG FATE

A teenager and an older man investigate a boy’s drowning in Robinson’s novel.

Yan is a 17-year-old living in Bangkok. He and his best friend, Toi, writes stories in which Yan is a detective and Toi is his doctor assistant. Then Yan gets a crush on a girl named Fah, and Toi stops coming to school. Yan is so infatuated with Fah, in fact, that he nearly forgets about his pal. Fah quickly proves to be a bad influence, but he follows her into trouble willingly. Across town, a scientist named Mr. Torpong becomes preoccupied with a cloud in the sky that his equipment picked up, but which doesn’t seem to exist in reality. When he tells others about it, they don’t take him seriously. His story intersects with Yan’s when he learns of a boy who recently drowned; Mr. Torpong feels that Yan may have known him. Could this be Toi, who suddenly disappeared? A police sergeant named Mongkut is investigating the youth’s death and suspects foul play, but the investigation goes slowly. These intersecting stories play out across the novel and finally intersect in an intense climax. The story as a whole has a surreal quality with a bit of magical realism; there’s an intriguing contrast between Mr. Torpong, who seems to be at the end of his life, and Yan, who’s at the beginning of his. The dense, meandering prose often lingers on imagery rather than action: “He envisioned the sun, and then the crescent moon with the morning star sinking into the east, and then the morning light withdrawn. The assiduous black of night began to chisel out each the billion stars inside his intellect until—voilà the revealing spark!” There are mythic elements—references to folktales, mythology, and more recent tales of Sherlock Holmes—and recurring motifs, such as a black-and-white cat that visits Yan and Mr. Torpong, which make for an intriguing mélange of influences. However, the narrative generally wanders, and the story sometimes feels hard to follow as a result.

A dreamlike but disjointed mystery with vivid imagery.