Amy Myers catches up with the British crime novelist
Q. The most striking aspect of this novel for me is the way you have presented Thai life as an overall picture, so that its crime, sex and drugs aspects become an accepted part of everyday life, rather than separated as part of an underworld. You live in Bangkok, so did the novels follow from your life there, or did you move there after your novels and research made it irresistible?
A. I wanted to live in Thailand from the first visit in 1986. This was purely a consequence of Thai charm, however, since I knew almost nothing about the country until I came to live here in 2001. I had not lived full-time in a developing country before. I had no idea the extent to which the economy of the poor blends with the underworld in a land without social security. Also, the importance of the black economy is much more obvious in a developing country. In fact, a huge proportion of the funds sloshing around the world derive from the illegal drug industry, but in the West this reality is hardly referred to. If estimates are correct that one third of the world’s wealth is black money, then in reality there is hardly a large building project on earth that does not make use of funds which are tainted to some extent.
Q. You’ve given Sonchai a Western absentee father, and a Thai upbringing with his prostitute mother. Over the years Sonchai has developed a Western side, both in his likes (he’s an American thriller-buff, for example) and in his career (such as his relationship with Kimberley Jones). Tietsin, his guru, is the ‘Godfather’ of Kathmandu. Did you plan it this way because it opened up opportunities for Sonchai to see Asian life both as an outsider and as a native, or because it enabled Sonchai to bridge the divide between West and East for your readers?
A. From the start Sonchai has been sincere and even zealous about his Buddhism. Although he looks to the West for cultural entertainment, he always looks East when it comes to matters of the sprit. However, as a bilingual Eurasian who surfs the Net, he cannot help noticing that there is an alternative form of Buddhism out there. He was brought up in the Theravada tradition, which is roughly the equivalent to the orthodox Christian church in that it claims to be the ‘original’ teaching. Tibetan Buddhism, on the other hand, derives from the highly developed form of Buddhism called Mahayana which fled India during the Mogul invasion and continued its development in the monasteries of Tibet. Sonchai, a natural intellectual, is intrigued and seduced. All of a sudden he is the ignorant Westerner asking naïve questions about Buddhism.