A Good Read - If Truth Be Told Stories Of Gay Thailand

[wowpow]

The tales in Peter Murrell’s If Truth Be Told are mainly about gay men in Thailand, and any reader who, as resident or visitor, knows the scene will recognise with pleasure the many touches that show the writer has noted and thought about the puzzles, oddities and curiosities of ‘farang’ life in the Land of Smiles. They are deftly sketched, the language is lively and clear, and the author’s ironic eye and wit seldom fail him. However, though the material is explicit when it needs to be (as in Sex Show, where we have to experience what the main character feels), these stories do not bring the instant gratification that some may expect from ‘gay fiction’. Some are highly comic, but readers should perhaps take their cue from the early pages of the book – including the painting reproduced on the front cover

This is a radical take on a famous modern painting, but the elegant calm of the original is replaced by a very tense scene. The farang and the Thai boy confront each other, the former hesitantly expectant, the latter shy, perhaps filled with foreboding. There is a great, unfilled space between them and it is by no means sure that anything will be created to fill it. The epigraph of the book is "If thou hast not seen the devil, look at thine own self"; and the first story, Short Time (a title that turns out to be savagely ambiguous), hardly makes for a comfortable read. A totally unremarkable first-time visitor to Thailand rambles in his thoughts as a boy sleeps on the bed in the short-time room. Peter Murrell does not deal in snappy endings, but the shocks can be devastating. Within the first seven pages of the book we have been brought face-to-face with what, in other contexts, has been called ‘the banality of evil’.

Full article http://www.spicemag.net/viewarticle.php?article=139

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The cover picture by 'Bird' Sawekjun is patently 'after' Hockney's Mr and Mrs Ozzie Clark and Percy. Surprisingly there is no credit. Maybe all will become clear with further reading?

I have just read the first three stories and I find them very good indeed.

Edited August 4, 2007 by wowpow