 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’.
Though many of the tales could be described as ‘moral tales’, the writer never moralises explicitly. Rather, he tells the tale and lets it do its work. This not only requires the participation of the readers, but gives them imaginative elbow-room. When in Best Friends, in which two seriously odd characters who have been united throughout life by an obsession with an obscure incident in European history, fall out over their rivalry for the same Thai boy, we may momentarily, at the farcical climax, identify with the boy, who stands on the beach at Jomtien watching them. “He laughed and he laughed and he laughed.” We do too, but not in quite the same way, because we understand more than a Thai boy ever could what it is that makes these strange human beings tick. But we have to do a little work.
In fact, many of the tales explore, sympathetically and with a desire to understand, the foibles of unusual characters. In Flashlight Karl we have the satisfaction of seeing the egocentric character get his come-uppance for the strange and callous routines he goes through in offing a boy. But the moving Sex Show (the story that runs the greatest risk of being misread as pornography) is a painful exploration of the personal inadequacy that leads a man to discover voyeurism. We know that his ecstatic welcoming of the experience that he thinks is to be the answer to his problems is just another piece of self-delusion. Though Peter Murrell, of course, does not tell us this. In Miss Lulu the hilarious forging of a relationship between a predatory ladyboy and an Austrian who can’t perform successfully with women leaves us laughing, but wondering where it can possibly all end.
Three of the tales are about Thais. The most accomplished and moving is undoubtedly Garbage, in which the writer enters with delicate imagination into the life of a 9 year-old slum-dwelling girl, Bo, who supports her brothers and sisters and their drunken parents by picking over garbage and selling what she can of it. It is so touchingly written and convincing that the black dénouement is almost unbearable to read.
Sometimes Peter Murrell is not completely successful. Nightlife is a ghost story prompted, no doubt, by the intense belief that Thais have in ghosts and spirits. However it does not involve any Thai characters, and he trips on the usual problems associated with this genre. Pictures come off the wall, the ghost is a dark, shapeless blob at the end of the bed, and, when the main character, Greg, has important advice for the poor wandering spirit, we remember (perhaps!) that this Australian has a German surname and so can communicate with the ghost in its own language. Whether or not ghosts are language-specific in their understanding is a moot point, but we might feel the author’s usual sense of irony has momentarily deserted him.
Two tales, The Ordination and The Funeral, are built round the religious ceremonies that seem to catch up with most farang who establish long-term relationships with Thais. Intriguingly, it is difficult to decide what our attitude to the farang should be at the end of the former story; but perhaps our uncertainty mirrors his own self-questioning. Similarly, at the end of Breakfast at Terry’s, in which a garrulous café owner describes an OTT Bangkok whore who lived nearby and ends up with a story about her that is really a one-liner, we might note (as the café owner apparently does not) the callousness of her attitude to her own child; or we might say mai pen rai, it takes all types, let’s have a good laugh. There’s always something for a reader of Peter Murrell to do.
In the final tale, If Truth Be Told, a man residing in Chiang Mai who has lived a closet existence for the whole of his life is trying to write an autobiography. He breaks through the writer’s block he is suffering from by reconciliation with himself. With self-acceptance he can write again; it’s an appropriate signing-off point for this distinguished book of stories.
It is impossible to ignore the fact that these are tales by a gay writer about gay situations and are rooted in a special geographical and cultural context. Nevertheless, like nearly all good fiction, whether comic or dark, they ‘look into the heart of man’ and help us understand more perceptively our own hearts and the hearts and lives of others. Peter Murrell needs watching – if you get my meaning! |
