Humour - and glory in the prose

Selected Short Stories of Thailand

By William Peskett

Published by Ex Libris, 2015

Available from Amazon, $11.99

 

Return to the Go-Go

By William Peskett

Published by Durian Books, 2015

Available from Amazon.com, $8.95

 

Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

 

THE SUNDAY NATION

 

PATTAYA WRITER William Peskett, whose fourth collection of entertaining yarns, “The Day of the Tiger and Other Stories”, warranted much praise in a review here last February, has recently released two more books of short tales that, read together, demonstrate his remarkable agility and range.

The 45 entries in “Return to the Go-Go” come directly from his blog, It Occurs to Me, and are invariably comical no matter how serious the subject matter – censorship, for example (those inexplicable “fuzzy blobs” on the TV screen), or the military coup (our General Leader’s insistence on interrupting shows you didn’t intend to watch in the first place).

These are Peskett’s nonchalant musings, as narrated by his alter ego Khun Pobaan, a farang whose missus hails from the mid-South. Their excursions together around Thailand provide much of the fodder, and together they visit a go-go bar in “Funtown”, too, more or less “for old time’s sake”.

Oddly, that’s about the only mention of go-go bars in “Return to the Go-Go”, but, rather than having seemingly sworn off the red-light districts he once stalwartly patronised, Peskett has quite a few pole-shakers in “Selected Short Stories of Thailand”, the other book just released.

None of the bar depictions in either collection, it has to be stressed, are of the lurid or sordid variety that expatriate writers here tend to churn out as though scantily clad dancers wearing convenient “pick me” numbers are all that Thailand has to offer. On the contrary, when not actually having a laugh at the situation, Peskett – who used to write a column for a Pattaya newspaper – can be incisive, ironic and above all surprising. 

He can get “lurid” if the occasion calls for it, but only with tongue lodged in cheek: 

“The way I recall it, Morgan Quincy oozed onto the Cookhouse, her breasts like cantaloupes and her hair like fire. I mixed her a Bloody Mary and she held the cherry between her lips like a ripe corpuscle she’d sucked from my surrendering heart. She mounted a bar stool and crossed her legs. The swell of her thighs shone bright as horse flanks.”

The sharpness in the choice and play of words is why Peskett stands out in Thailand’s conclave of expat scribes. A phrase like “the sky’s sodden duvet of cloud” stops you in your tracks.

His gift for prose isn’t as evident in “Return to the Go-Go”, which after all comprises |only lightweight rambles designed to amuse – tufts of chuckles about toothbrushes, vasectomies and road safety.

“Selected Short Stories of Thailand” is the book to choose for the textual jewellery. These yarns are all drawn from his four prior collections – “Mango and Sticky Rice”, “Mist on the Jungle”, “Sweet Song of the Siren” and the aforementioned “Day of the Tiger” – the last providing five wonderful pieces republished in the hope of reaching a broader readership.

One of these, “The Sea Isle of Itsara”, begins with an acknowledgement of its inspiration, “After WB Yeats”. Specifically the allusion is to “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, in which Yeats announces, “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, and a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made.”

Peskett sets his soul’s course instead toward a tropical island where magical fantasy and very human yearnings are together at play. “There surely must be tools there because I cannot bring my own. It’s tempting to believe that the memory of tools will be enough ... My power tools, the grinder, drill and saw, will work without their cables.”

Yeats wanted “a hive for the honey-bee” so he might “live alone in the bee-loud glade”. Peskett, another imaginative Irishman, anticipates rabbits and chickens and bush pigs as food and companions, but not bees – “their infernal buzzing would be an annoyance and besides I can’t stand the taste of honey”.

Much of his writing uncovers the magic in the world even as it acknowledges the pathos in the human condition. Everyday dramas, chance meetings, however mundane, turn out to be crucial cogs in the cosmos.

In the episode “Sweet Song of the Siren”, a diver’s encounter with a mermaid – and the astonishing relationship that ensues – is perhaps a commentary on foreign men marrying Thai women. It’s a startling story, becoming more startling as you proceed, and yet – typically of Peskett’s writing – the machinery of the tale becomes almost secondary to the telling. 

“In the evenings we’d bob about at anchor, fry up some fish in the galley and drink beer until the stars speckling the canopy of our enormous world had heard enough of our trite wisdom and commanded us to sleep.”

 

   Word factory

Keep pace with the author at www.WilliamPeskett.com.

His humorous blog is called It Occurs to Me: www.WilliamPeskett.com/blog