Bangkok Tattoo

#160
Title: Bangkok Tattoo
Author: John Burdett
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 2005
311 pages

The second of Burdett's novels featuring Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep. This adventure opens with the apparent murder of a john by a prostitute employed by Sonchai's mother. What the book does well is to illustrate the Buddhist principle that what we take as reality is illusory. As the narrative unfolds, the reader constructs and is forced to discard multiple hypotheses regarding the murder and subsequent events. The motif of tattoos, which are a representation of life and thus themselves illusions, lends itself nicely to this premise. What is less successful in this installment is the plot, which never quite gathered sufficient energy to compel me. Elements such as Sonchai's relationship with the CIA operative from Bangkok 8 are raised but then dropped. While this might reflect a perspective that all is transient and meaningless, I do not think this was the author's intention; it simply appears to be an error. In addition, many of the characters are emotionally more flat than in the first book. This decreases empathy. Though Sonchai is represented as a non-corrupt cop, his morality and decision-making strategies are not Western. Because the author has not maintained the reader's empathy with Sonchai, many of his actions seem decidedly corrupt (whereas in Bangkok 8 they made sense given what the reader learned of Sonchai's interior dialogue and perspective). In addition, many of Sonchai's asides to the reader (addressed, as in Bangkok 8, as "farang" throughout) seem hostile and contemptuous, a jarring tone at odds with Sonchai's character. Indeed, many of these asides, such as long screeds on how Thai women are not really oppressed by prostitution, seem to reflect the authorial voice, not Sonchai's. I'm willing to suspend both disbelief and my own values in service to reading fiction, but this blurring of voice repeatedly drew me out of the narrative and into a silent argument with Burdett, who is, it should be noted, also a farang.