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Chairs
Book Reviews
The Bangkok Post
Bernard Trink
Comprehending the Realm is more than speaking
the language, reading its history and literature, travelling around
it, living with and/or marrying its people. As only little is what
it appears to be (sea and air pollution are just that), it is necessary
to be sharp to see through the conjurers' attempts to spellbind
us.
To his credit, Christopher G. Moore has the sharpest eyes and most
discerning mind on these shores, his being an expat notwithstanding.
Indeed, a good many locals are unaware of the levels and degrees
of subterfuge enmeshing them. They have some idea from personal
experience and the vernacular press, but that's only the tip of
the iceberg.
Perusing Moore's books takes the reader
through the castes, corruption, calumnies, covetousness, cant, conceit
that is the nation's infrastructure. This reviewer allows that some
expat authors are easier reads, but that's because their Thailand-based
novels are primarily aimed at entertaining us, offering little insight.
With Moore, it's the other way around.
The 16 original stories in Chairs are based on years of actual Saturday
morning get-togethers of freelance journalists in Amarin Plaza (Ploenchit
Road). I assume it's based on the weekly meetings of journalists
at the Big Apple's Algonquin Hotel during the 1920s and '30s, though
it might have its roots in French and English soirees centuries
earlier.
Moore is himself, but gives the other
participants fictitious names. The passing away of Sam Kohl, one
of the regulars, has them recollecting incidents in his life they
witnessed. They also talk about people they interviewed, leading
the listeners (and readers) to doubt their veracity. Did Paul Thornton
interview Bu Lu ("Luther"), one of the pre-teenage brothers
that founded God's Army in Burma? It's left up in the air.
The stories are as varied as motorcyclists
wearing helmets with swastikas, the state executioner doing his
duty, the owner of a private English school who sets her cap for
a farang she hired to teach, a writer trying to persuade Tina Turner
to knock his book in order to increase its sales, an accountant
refusing to have an affair with a doctor thus bringing him closer
to his wife, how rivalry between Hawaiian shirt collectors is resolved.
Their usual table is near the escalators
and conversation ceases whenever nubile damsels, virtually all respectable,
glide up or down. All are lovely and smiling, the journalists agreeing
that this combination isn't to be found in their homelands, so there's
no inducement to return to them. They tell why they first came to
Thailand.
Footnotes are informative and amusing;
I wish there were more of them. "The Uncover Diplomat"
is my favourite story, about an oil rigger who buys a secondhand
car with diplomatic licence plates, breaking every traffic law on
the books before the authorities outsmart him. By contrast "Ever
Yours", about a Thai woman kleptomaniac, doesn't work.
To paraphrase Graham Greene in another context, Moore is our man
in Bangkok.
Pattaya Mail
Book Review
Contrary to its unlikely title,
this is not a book about interior decorating or a catalogue of Swedish
minimalist furniture. It is, in fact, the latest fiction piece (published
on November 10th) from Christopher G. Moore, a prolific wordsmith
with 14 previous books to his credit, and who is living in Bangkok.
The book follows the exploits
of a loose-knit group of freelance journalists living and meeting
weekly in the nations capital. They discuss their projects and happenings,
bouncing ideas off one another, as one does in real life. Moore
then cuts to the nub of the situation with the well honed skill
of the surgeon, exposing the sinews and singular peculiarities that
make men leave their native countries to become front-line freelancers
in Asia.
What gives Moore so much of his
local following is his use of Bangkok (and even our own Pattaya
in this book) as the backdrop for some very skilfully crafted and
very believable fiction. This effect is of course aided by having
real places for his freelance journalist subjects to function within.
The old Thermae on Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok and even Beach Road
Pattaya are believable places for some very way out, (but eminently
believable in Thailand), characters to inhabit.
Another ploy to give more realism
to the unreal is Moore’s use of footnotes, which are indeed factual.
Within the sixteen short stories he also runs a thread of factual
information, though in the piece on the Nazi helmets in Pattaya
he is incorrect with the statement that the story on the helmets
was broken by the Bangkok Post and the Nation. It was in fact this
newspaper, the Pattaya Mail, which broke the story and the Bangkok
papers picked it up from our publication of the story in our web
edition. However, this but a small criticism and is not enough for
us to wish to recall all the published copies!
But it is Moore’s use of the
English language that appeals so much to me. Describing, for example,
a Patpong bar as a place “where white women were as welcome as a
crack dealer at a Baptist Revival.” Or “He looked as comfortable
as an eel in a sandbox full of crabs.”
Another excellent feature in this book is that although the short
narratives are all “stand alone” pieces, they are also inter-related
and impinge on each other in unsuspected ways. Moore is much more
than just a wordsmith, he is a literary craftsman. Particularly
effective is the way the majority of the stories are narrated by
one of his cast of freelancers, Sam Kohl, who then introduces the
author, Christopher Moore, in the third person. Not only clever,
but it works as well.
The review copy was courtesy
of the publishers, Heaven Lake Press in Bangkok, but stocks of “Chairs”
should be available in all leading bookshops with a RRP of 475 baht.
It is an excellent read, and with the short story format you can
pick it up and put it down without losing continuity. However, you
won’t want to put it down!
Not since Paul Theroux’s The Consul’s Files and Sherwood Anderson’s
Winesburg, Ohio, has a collection of interlocking short stories
so successfully revealed the interior lives of members of a small
community; in the case of Chairs, the community is a group of Bangkok
freelance journalists working the frontlines of modern day Southeast
Asia. By weaving narrative juxtapositions between these freelancers,
the reader follows a pathway populated by adventurers, body snatchers,
executioners, dreamers, collectors, diplomats, mistresses, ghosts
and war veterans. Part memoir, part funeral book, these sixteen
original short stories are written with flair and considerable imagination.
Chairs is a richly layered eagle’s eye view of the a community of
expat journalists as they struggle to understand what it means to
be displaced in Thailand.
Heaven Lake Press (2000),
281 pp.
 
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