The dreamweaver of Bangkok

Reading Jim Algie’s fiction for the first time can be quite upsetting. Evidently the multitude of bizarre real-life things, places and customs that he’s chronicled over the years, culminating in the 2010 book “Bizarre Thailand”, are just not bizarre enough for the ex-Nation subeditor and former chief gadabout of Farang magazine, which he co-founded.

Algie’s imagination is much stranger. Perhaps he’s seen too many foetuses in jars, too many limbless street musicians, too many shadows in the inky Bangkok noir. The first four stories in “The Phantom Lover” are all ghastly urban nightmares hyperventilating on gouts of blood and gore, violence and vengeance. “This guy ought to be chained up someplace,” I thought. (I don’t know Jim very well, despite getting a passing thank-you in this book’s introduction, presumably for my review of “Bizarre Thailand”.) 

Gradually, though, the method in his madness becomes clearer. At times I was wincing at the stumbling prose of an unpolished Poe. It can be hackneyed and rough, but the jagged broken-bottle edges build a sense of danger and inescapable doom that makes every tale as compelling as a train crash. The crazy tidal wash of metaphors and unexpected allusions to real places and events is disorienting, forming a surreal backdrop worthy of HP Lovecraft.

Against this backdrop designed by Lovecraft and Poe and Salvador Dali too, and doubtless Henry Miller (to whose midlife degradation Algie pays homage), a series of very real people act out the impulses and face the demons they have kept bottled up too long. 

There’s a soul-crushed snake handler in a Phuket tourist show and an Australian photographer confronted by the zombies of guilt. And there’s a bar girl called Watermelon whose job turns horribly homicidal.

The fourth story is an extraordinary imagining of what See Ouey was really like. He’s Bangkok’s notorious Chinese “cannibal killer” of the 1950s, a rickshaw puller who snapped. See Ouey was executed for his crimes and his body was preserved and put on display in the forensics museum at Siriraj Hospital, which is where Algie saw it years ago and had a chapter about it in “Bizarre Thailand”.

But, miffed at being told the man “remains an enigma”, Algie had meanwhile dug up additional information and did some clever extrapolating for a 1998 novella that was nominated for an award. “The Legendary Nobody” – the version in the new book – is less than 30 pages, but perhaps these are one and the same. 

Only toward the end does Algie abruptly reveal that the murderer actually existed, a shock to anyone reading a yarn too incredible to believe. The effect is quite jolting.

Something similar happens in the fifth story, “Obituary for the Khaosan Road Outlaws and Imposters”, but here the revelation isn’t as striking as the street-gutter philosophising in which it’s lavishly couched. 

What begins as a surely fictional portrayal of human trafficking morphs into an oily octopus clutching in its various tentacles the red-light scene, backpack and expat life such as it is, the joys of heroin, the 1997 economic crisis and the vehicular traffic jams as well. Even Watermelon puts in another appearance.

And it turns out to be a eulogy not just for one of the central characters but for Bangkok as it once was, earlier in the 1990s. Although there are a few sweaty scenes, the reader is given a reprieve from the terrors of the earlier stories as Algie slows the pace for contemplation, and some of his best writing is here. There are lots of great passages, about the old-formula Singha beer, for example – “it tasted like heartache, the perfect aperitif for all the desperate whore-chasers”. He mentions “a ceiling fan chopping the hot, thick air into cooler and thinner blades that needled his face”.

The story itself titled “Phantom Lover” is the book’s centrepiece and high-water mark, after which it’s a coast through a gentler landscape that even includes an affectionate profile of a pet cat (somewhat cruelly titled “A Vicious Little Monk”). Characters from the previous stories continue to reappear in unnerving fashion, though, and the more relaxed pace ends abruptly with the beginning of the final chapter, “Tsunami” – in which they all assemble for a spectacular finale.

This tale born from the 2004 catastrophe takes on the challenge voiced by a university professor back in “Phantom Lover”. He asks a student if her thesis is incorporating too many threads. “I can’t see how all these pieces are going to fit together.”

Here, even in the midst of epic destruction, Algie’s chaos theory of composition doesn’t work quite as well. There is just too much going on in a mix of plot lines that masks the overall intent. The unavoidable anguish of countless tsunami recollections is swallowed up in an effort to explain what half a dozen characters have been through and are going through.

The overall success of “Phantom Lover” cannot be denied, however. The book is at times intensely thought-provoking. What happens the rest of the time will guarantee every reader a few lost nights of sleep.

 

 

 

The Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand

By Jim Algie

Published by Tuttle, 2014

Available at Asia Books, Bt440

Reviewed by Paul Dorsey