Man, is this a good book.
Bangkok 8 by John Burdett is one of the rare books that left me saying, Damn, I wish I’d written that.
Sonchai Jitpleecheep is the only cop in Thailand not on the take. He used to share that distinction with his partner (and close friend) Pichai, but Pichai is killed during what should have been a routine mission, and Sonchai vows to kill whoever did it. The ensuing investigation takes him (and us) through modern Thailand: karma, sex, drugs, Buddhism, Americans, reincarnation, and fallout from the Vietnam War, which includes the lowly social status of the offspring of American GIs, white and black, and Thai mothers, which pretty ensures they grow up to be whores…or cops.
Bangkok 8 introduces you to what life in Thailand is like—or at least it leaves you feeling as though this is what life is like. The depiction of this society is fabulous. The characters are almost all great (and certainly more three-dimensional than in most books). The storyline behind the murder mystery is about more than someone just killing someone else.
Plus, this book is funny. There’s the scene in which Sonchai blithely talks to one of his mom’s old coworkers as she practices her act (which involves popping balloons in a rather unorthodox manner). Or the way Sonchai remarks to the reader how he knows several other characters from their past lives…right as he meets them. Or just little musings on the way things are in Thailand:
For reasons unfathomable to me, the Colonel has hung on the wall behind his desk a map of Thailand issued by the Crime Suppression Division, which shows the geographical areas in which police conniving in organized crime is supposed to be at its worst. Arrows of different colors point almost everywhere. Along the Lao and Cambodian borders the police help smuggle drugs and endangered species destined for China; along the Burmese border we help bring in enough methamphetamines weekly to keep the entire population awake for a month. All along the coast the police work hand in hand with Customs and Excise to assist the clandestine oil trade, for which most of the country’s fishing fleet has adapted its boats: they sail out to offshore tankers most nights, receiving the contraband diesel into their specially designed stainless steel tanks; more than 12 percent of Thailand’s diesel oil is contraband. All around the edges of Krung Thep and in hundreds of rural locations the police protect illegal gambling dens, mostly from other police and the army, which is always trying to muscle in. At street level the police commercial genius produces some of the best cooked-food stalls in the city, owned and run by young constables who are immune to prosecution for illegal hawking. The map is a mind-boggling maze of red, green, yellow and orage arrows designating the different infractions indigenous to each area, with Day-Glo cross-hatching, dire warnings in boxes, pessimistic footnotes and stark headers. I am not the first to observe that the Colonel is the only person in the room not to have it in his field of vision.
I have gazed at this map many times. Taking into account that the police are generally facilitating someone else’s scam, it begins to look as if 61 million people are engaged in a successful criminal enterprise of one sort or another. No wonder my people smile a lot.
One of the best features of Bangkok 8 is how many shades of gray there are with every character: Sonchai isn’t necessarily better than anyone else because he doesn’t take bribes; his mother is straightforward in her approach to her profession; the Colonel in charge of Sonchai’s district is massively on the take…and yet honorable at the same time. Sonchai’s outlook on life—sex, drugs, money, desire, passion—is completely alien and yet completely understandable.
Many of the reviewers on Amazon mention how much they hated the ending. I have to completely disagree—I thought the ending was completely in character with everything that had gone before. If you haven’t figured out by the end that life in Thailand is a little different than it is in the West…well, can’t help you there.
Great, just great. Give me something else that I now must go get and read, whydoncha. Geez. The pile is already higher than I will ever get to.
(but hey, that one sounds really great)
Oh, I just finished this, too! It was an impulse book I got at the library, grabbed it off a display on my way to check out. Yes, yes, I thoroughly enjoyed it, for all the reasons you did. I really loved the parts where Sonchai talked about past lives, his own and the people around him. I liked the ending, too. I was really dreading the end because I would afraid it would either be too depressing or too smarmy. But no, it was just right.
Wonderful book! How the author managed to blend mysticism, criticism of the West and East, science-fiction, and the mystery tale is beyond my ability to understand–and I know how difficult the feat is, as I’ve published 13 books. I may never have enjoyed a book as much as I have Bangkok 8. If you have any love of mysteries or science fiction or the mysteries of how one culture faces another, this is one book you should read.