Timothy Mo

There are two threads in this book, we start with Chen, a waiter living in London with his wife and sister-in-law and infant son and follow them a few years. The interesting character is Lily, who isn't much liked but seems to have the strongest sense of purpose and drive of the family. The second thread is a dead boring gang narrative which motivates some of the action in Chen's story and was probably considered relevant when the book was published, but hasn't any of the life of the internal family story.… (more)

Globalization, an American dictionary informs us, is ‘the removal of barriers between national economies to encourage the flow of goods, services, capital, and labor’. Well, in practice, of course, it means the rich countries of the West exporting and imposing their norms on everyone else, whether through language, legal inequalities, superior marketing nous or the always present threat of violence. This is the great theme of this stupendous novel by the British/Hong Kong writer Timothy Mo, who tells the truth of globalization as seen from the other end, from the bottom, so to speak, by one of Frantz Fanon’s ‘wretched of the earth.’

Read the full review on The Lectern… (more)

The first novel to be written by Timothy Mo in over 10 years is set in contemporary Thailand, and the main character is Ahmed, who prefers to be called Snooky, a narcissistic ladyboy (transvestite) from a Muslim family in southern Thailand who does drugs on a regular basis and steals from upscale stores and his her straight male clients to support her decidedly non-Islamic lifestyle in the heart of Bangkok. She and her fellow katoeys are caught by vice squad officers in flagrante delicto during a drug fueled orgy, and Snooky is beaten and imprisoned after she taunts them. In exchange for her release from charges that could send her to prison for decades, she provides the vice squad with valuable information and agrees to work as an undercover agent for a local Islamic school that is suspected of carrying out acts of terror.

The novel consists of chapters narrated by the key characters: Snooky; Victor, a pompous Oxbridge professor and former British intelligence agent in Southeast Asia; Shakyh, the Pakistani mastermind of the Islamic school; and Umar, the school's spiritual leader, who secretly despises Shakyh and Snooky Ahmed. Victor's main purpose is to provide a historical backdrop for the rise of Muslim extremism in southeast Asia; Shakyh also serves in that role in addition to planning the group's increasingly more violent acts. Snooky becomes more radicalized, while she hides but doesn't disavow her ladyboy identity or her drug habit, and walks a dangerous tightrope as she provides the police with information about the group, knowing that she will meet a painful death if she is uncovered.

Pure is an interesting novel about the political history of Thailand and the rise of Islamic activity in southeast Asia. However, I found the novel to be overly clever and rather unfocused, one which would have benefitted from an experienced editor, which this book apparently didn't have. It has received rare reviews, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was selected for the upcoming Booker Prize longlist, but I would be disappointed if it did.… (more)