Thailand - A woman of Bangkok

Can anyone today match the captivating prose of the original bargirl novel, "A Woman of Bangkok", newly revived after 55 years?

I was confident I'd read enough bargirl books to last a lifetime (three or four should do it), only to discover embarrassingly late, with considerable shock, that the one that launched the genre in 1956 is actually terrific.

Nothing written since comes close to "A Woman of Bangkok". With this reissue, for those who never read it, Singapore-based Monsoon Books expunges the belief that bargirl books have always been as trashy as their subject matter.

The difference between "A Woman of Bangkok" and everything that's followed it is, once again, the quality of the writing. Here it is superb, as is in this description early on in the novel of the rush to leave an English cinema when the movie's ended:

"A thousand plush seats have hiccups as two thousand buttocks ascend a few inches nearer heaven. If you reach the back aisle before the drum roll you can carry on to the exit without convicting yourself of treason...Go-o-od save the Queen. Alright, you can go now. The royal countenance is obliterated by sumptuous curtains and American jive steps sharp on the heels of Britain's most-played tune."

The book teems with passages like that, and when Jack Reynolds transplants his prose to Thailand (minus any disrespect to the monarchy, of course), the results are riveting.

The movie that protagonist-narrator Reg Joyce had just seen was the 1952 hit "Ivanhoe", which - in what becomes a crucial linkage later - is also playing at the Chalerm Krung Theatre in Bangkok when he arrives. He views Ivanhoe as "well motivated but a silly ass over women".

Once he meets Vilai, celebrated among expat bar-crawlers as "the number one lay in Bangkok, in the Orient, in the world", it's his turn. To her, he isn't Reg, he's Wretch, the way she fathoms his name. That's telling enough, but he's oblivious.

Reg is the epitome of naivety, a vicar's son who's left behind a trail of dissatisfied family and friends. His wife ran off with his brother. He still feels guilty about killing a fellow competitor in a motorcycle race. He has a lot to get over. A British firm gives him the opportunity at its Thai office, flogging "everything from sewing machines to mousetraps" around the country.

He quickly hits his stride professionally and socially, but then he encounters Vilai, who calls herself the White Leopard and "Bangkok No 1 Bad Girl". The novel has three segments: Lamb, Leopard and Slaughter.

"Before I'd met her I'd been taking the route that almost any beaten-up, self-pitying man is liable to take if he has enough money...My drinking, the cheap and easy conquests of the stews, the daily atmosphere of feasting and good humour...Swiftly, cheerfully, I had been turning into a no-good [albeit] the sort that is little trouble to anyone but himself, and a positive angel to brewers and pimps."

Reg reckons that he and Vilai can leave that world and make a fresh start together. "I was all the time dreaming of lifting her up to my level through the power of my love," he says with the typical self-serving arrogance of the farang.

She is delighted to take full advantage, opening a jugular in his bank account and relishing his obeisance. Reg reminds her of her son's puppy. "If he'd been Chokchai he'd have collapsed on his side wagging all over."

Reg knows he's being taken for a ride but Vilai keeps getting in alleged jams that require his assistance, so he keeps trying. It takes a few more stiff beatings and many more transfusions of cash before he sees the futility of trying to "rescue" her.

"I felt soiled all over, as if I'd fallen into a cesspool. It was a feeling I quite often got when talking to Vilai. Suddenly this woman whom to me was so bewitching would speak 'truce' words - would reveal with brazen honesty the true nature of her mind."

For all its "Moon and Sixpence" whimsy and "Ugly American" dramatics, "A Woman of Bangkok" will strike its expatriate first-time readers as a warm summation of this place. The city back then had trams and pedal-power samlor and foreigners spent "tics" rather than baht, clinging to the old Malay term tical.

But the story remains the same, after all. Not only are the heartbreakers of the night still prowling the red-lit savannah for fresh blood but, equally, the nobility of the average Thai is unchanged, as beautifully captured in the middle segment of the book, seen entirely through the eyes of the Leopard in her lair. Her housekeepers, her son, her long-dead daughter and her rural background all come into play in an enchanting evocation of grace in its natural state.

Jack Reynolds (born Emrys Reynolds Jones) came to Thailand with Unicef in 1951, married a Catholic Thai and had seven children. In 1967 he began working for the Bangkok Post as an editor and writer while continuing to travel the world on UN missions. He died in Bangkok in 1984, having published a non-fiction book about his earlier work in China - but never another novel.

Paul Dorsey

The Nation

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