Sightseeing

[tutsiwarrior]

Sold to the farangs

William Sutcliffe applauds the wit and richness of Rattawut Lapcharoensap's deft debut collection, Sightseeing

Saturday April 9, 2005

The Guardian

Buy Sightseeing at the Guardian bookshop

Sightseeing

by Rattawut Lapcharoensap

250pp, Atlantic, £10

The publicity material for Sightseeing is emblazoned with the slogan, "The Beach bites back". To understand what this means, you have to look back to the late 90s, when, with the grip of political correctness weakening, a generation of white, western writers emerged, most notably Alex Garland, who felt able to write about Asia without being crippled by the fear that nothing a white person could say about the continent would be worth reading. (Indeed, when a German journalist interviewed me about my novel Are You Experienced?, he began with the question: "So, is this book your revenge on post-colonialist literature?")

Though the word "revenge" strikes the wrong note, there is a plausible theory that, for a while, post-post-colonialist literature was flourishing. Now the wheel, it appears, has turned once more. With the publication of Sightseeing, post-post-post-colonialist literature has been born.

Rattawut Lapcharoensap has a fine post-post-post-colonialist pedigree: he was born in Chicago, raised in Bangkok, and is now a fellow at the University of East Anglia. Sightseeing, his debut publication, is a collection of stories all set in Thailand. The opener, "Farangs" - Thai slang for foreigners - wittily maps out his territory.

The story tells of a Thai teenager living in a beach resort who watches Rambo on TV, has a pet pig called Clint Eastwood and, to the consternation of his mother, lusts after "farang" tourists. The story relates a brief affair with an American girl in a Budweiser bikini, which is disrupted by the appearance of the girl's American ex-boyfriend, and culminates in a bizarre fight between the American ex and the Thai boy's pet pig. The story is full of neat and amusing little cultural reversals, such as the boy offering (for a fee) to fix the spelling on his uncle's elephant hire sign, and being sharply told that the uncle has done it on purpose, because farangs find it charming.

It is in the accumulation of these details that Lapcharoensap reveals his strength as a writer. With immense skill, he treads the line between narrating a story that is driven by his engaging and plausible characters, and making serious socio-political points about the way in which Thais are debased by flogging themselves and a bastardised version of their culture to foreigners.

As in all good first-person writing, this story reveals far more than our narrator thinks he is telling us. He reminisces fondly about how, as a child, he used to climb trees to fetch coconuts for foreigners. When he tells us that "For added effect, we'd make monkey noises when we climbed, which always made them laugh," Lapcharoensap's point is abundantly clear. Equally, the description of the postcard from a Miami girl, who invites the narrator to come and visit but fails to provide a return address, is subtly telling.

Lapcharoensap's feelings towards western culture are made more starkly apparent in the second story, in which the narrator's father is killed at a factory by a falling crate filled with "little wooden toys waiting to be sent to the children of America". Not, perhaps, the most subtle of metaphors, but it makes its point. The bereaved boy, however, still yearns for burgers (resulting in a gory, metaphorically freighted vomit scene) and wears American clothes. Yet Lapcharoensap is no political ranter. The story contains many deft and surprising changes of mood, and has a complex and skilfully handled chronology, giving brief glimpses into our protagonist's past and future.

Though the primary events of the tale take place over one evening, during which our 11-year-old protagonist is taken by his paint-thinner-sniffing elder brother to visit a whorehouse, the story is much more than just a wallow in degradation, and ascends to a far higher level than the merely anecdotal. This story, and others in the collection, have a truly novelistic richness.

Most impressive of all is the manner in which Lapcharoensap finds moments of beauty in otherwise bleak settings. This collection is intensely political and profoundly angry about the corrupt, poverty-stricken condition of Thailand, yet every story is primarily driven by a warmth and a belief in humanity that allows for unexpectedly uplifting and touching moments. That he achieves this without ever straying into kitsch is astonishing.

There is a risk that a writer like Lapcharoensap will be well-reviewed on the nod, tapping in as he does to reviewer-friendly political correctness, but will fail to find an audience among book buyers wary of octosyllabic names. Lapcharoensap deserves far better than that. The Thai setting for these stories is ultimately immaterial. Sightseeing is not mere reportage, but storytelling of the highest quality, profoundly human and universal.

Even good short stories often leave, like jokes, little after-taste. You enjoy them, then forget them. Only a few writers have the ability to give readers the feeling that in 20 or so pages you have not just read a story, but seen a life and a world revealed. Lapcharoensap is one of those writers. Every story in this collection is dense with event, emotion and meaning. This debut shows more than mere promise: it is a fine achievement in its own right.

· William Sutcliffe's most recent novel is Bad Influence (Hamish Hamilton)