Come with us now on a journey through time and space to the nethers of the crime-fiction cosmos. Suspend your disbelief and enter a world in which men are men, women are available and moustaches are the ultimate phallic symbol. Crack open a copy of The Cambodian Book of the Dead.
Tom Vater’s second crime novel, scheduled to be republished in June, has more layers than an onion and might leave you feeling similarly lachrymose. The year is 2001 and German Maier – ex-war reporter, current private investigator, life-long ladies man – is in Cambodia to convince the heir to a coffee empire to return home to Hamburg. Things get complicated when Maier gets involved with gangsters; ex-girlfriends; teenage girl assassins, Khmer Rouge generals and finally the Waffen SS, as our hard-boiled hero finds himself in a post-Apocalypse Now nightmare writing a Nazi war criminal’s biography while off his chops on amphetamines. And there you were thinking all disgraced Nazis ended up sunning themselves in Argentina (nota bene: factually, you’d be correct).
If it sounds like there’s a lot going on, you’re right: there is. But what’s sadly absent is a narrative arc on which to hang all these marvellous events and characters. The main plot sags as characters are swallowed up in the historical layers called into play by Vater; it could be a nice conceit to use shadows of conflicts past to augment the horror of Cambodia’s recent history, but it would have to be done with teleology rather than a trowel. Characters and storylines about which we want to know more are left frustratingly underdeveloped, and we’re left more knowledgeable about Maier’s boozing habits than we are about the case.
Which brings us to the case. “A strange case,” muses Maier in a moment of meta-textual angst. “A case without a crime.” Well, call me old-fashioned but I like my crime fiction to contain at least a modicum of crime. The fact that Maier’s PI assignment amounts to little more than babysitting a dull German through a protracted gap year does little to help the book’s lack of narrative propulsion. Crime fiction lore dictates that there must be two narrative lines: one leads the reader forward, as we wonder will our detective hero solve this dastardly murder; the other leads us backwards, as we wrack our brains for the killer’s motivation at the time the fatal blow was struck. Vater does not give us a good murder, man-eating sharks and all, until almost halfway through his novel and by that point both Maier and Dear Reader may be too drunk to care.
All this is a shame because Vater is excellent at capturing snapshots of the seedier side of Cambodia, creating a perfect backdrop for a noir-ish novel. The Kingdom is perfectly, utterly made for the crime-fiction genre: noir, hard-boiled, scandi noir all demand certain elements which Cambodia has in spades. Promise of violence? Check. Organised crime? Check. Institutionalised corruption? Check. Sex and death around every street corner? Well, possibly not the corners in BKK, but you never know.
The Cambodian Book of the Dead revels in this murky under-gusset, containing depictions of Heart of Darkness and Riverside realistic enough to make your toes curl. Rendering the seamy underbelly of the city, and human nature in general, seems right up Vater’s alleys and his sketches are hugely enjoyable for anyone familiar with Phnom Penh’s urban dystopia (hey, we’ve all been there, Reaksmey Burger).
There is potential for a great crime-fiction novel to be written about Cambodia; it could even be written by Tom Vater, an experienced Asia hand with numerous publications to his name. But you don’t have to be a super-sleuth to work out that The Cambodian Book of the Dead isn’t it.
WHO: Writer Tom Vater and a load of stiffs
WHAT: The Cambodian Book of the Dead
WHERE: Cambodia and Thailand with Exhibit A Publishers
WHEN: June
WHY: You need something to read in Snooky