Patrick Holland

It might be me, but this novel did not resonate with me like I thought it would and I'm not sure exactly why.

It is a story of a journalist searching for a mystery woman that he has fallen in love with or has become enchanted with, while navigating the dangerous world of decadent Vietnam and those that exist within the underworld of drugs and prostitution.

In the book, most of the characters may or may not be what they profess to be and while the main character navigates this world, in one way, he appears to be a one-dimensional character that seems to never learn when it comes to the dangers of walking within an underground society of those that offer depravities that one seeks.

Sort of like the older depiction of the noir detective that keeps getting hit on the head each time he walks into a room or by a dark alley and never seems to change his behavior.

In the end, it got to the point where I just wanted to finish the book to see how it ended and move on to the next book on my reading list.… (més)

As THE DARKEST LITTLE ROOM opens we meet Joseph, a 33 year-old expat Australian journalist who has been working in Indochina for some years and is now based in Saigon. As a freelancer he works on whatever stories he can find, using an ex policeman called Minh Quy as his investigator and, to supplement their income, as a fellow conspirator in some low-level blackmail. Joseph also pays a young street kid who calls himself Peter Pan to look for a girl that Joseph has lost touch with but is desperate to find. A German tourists seeks out Joseph and tells him about a club which is more sordid and depraved than all the other brothels in Saigon where, in a place called the darkest little room, a woman has been particularly brutally tortured. The tourist claims he is too scared to go to the police but thinks a journalist may be able to do something about the situation. Despite being warned off by Minh Quy and his rich business man friend Zhuan, Joseph does look into the situation which is about the point his life spirals into a version of madness as he finds (or does he?) the woman he has been looking for and goes on the hunt for her human traffickers.

The thing that struck me first about the novel is that this is not the Vietnam readers may have visited on a two-week package holiday or viewed through the prism of a Sunday afternoon travel show. It is a country in which human life is valued in a way completely foreign to my Australian middle-class existence and in which many people struggle with the grimmest of survivals due to a level of poverty I feel deeply fortunate never to have known. A poverty that those locals who do escape it never wish to think of again as Joseph explains early on

“People in Indochina are not sentimental about poverty. They do not read about it in books written by middle-class men and women who make safe dreams about poverty from a far far distance. So the romantic light in which we cast the condition does not shine, say, on the man at the top of the alley whose legs were blown of in the American War, now sleeping in the shopping trolley that his relatives push him about in; nor on the old woman with cancer, wet and filthy in a steaming house where her sons will not pay for the doctor and the doctor will not work without money and the morphine sits unused in a cupboard at the clinic a street away. All traces of poverty must be banished in Vietnam.” (p23).

This is how Holland lets us know that although he’s not a native he’s intimately familiar with the country. It’s also how he shows us we’re not in for an easy ride with THE DARKEST LITTLE ROOM. Not only will we be troubled by some fairly horrific imagery but we will, in all likelihood, have to confront our own beliefs about how we view and act towards people whose lives are vastly different from our own.

That breathtaking sense of place – the way it is so image-rich and enveloping that it makes you believe you are right there to the point that when the going gets tough (a frequent occurrence) I wanted to look out my window just to make sure I wasn’t in some seedy Saigon brothel or being chased through a northern Vietnamese jungle – is the only element of this novel about which I am not ambivalent.

About the rest I am...ambivalent.

I wonder if I have reached my fill, for example, of books in which women are not people. I do understand that a book dealing with a subject like human trafficking must, of necessity, depict many people with the view that women are mere objects but here there is not a solitary individual – not a sidekick (quirky or otherwise), not the protagonist and not the women themselves – who think or behave as if women are anything but things. Things to look at. Things to own and trade. Things to use and discard when the attributes that give them value – youth and beauty – have disappeared. I was hopeful that when Zhuan pointedly asked Joseph why he doesn’t crusade on the part of old whores and junkies (p124) that I might have found a lone voice with at least a slightly different view of women but, as things turn out,…no.

I am, I think, just heartily fed up with being constantly reminded of my inferior status as a human being in the way that this book does. I read one commentary in which the reader sees the woman at the centre of Joseph’s search as a strong character who fights back against her oppression and objectification using her street smarts but even on a second reflection of proceedings I cannot see this character in this way. I don’t want to spoil things for those of you who read the book so will simply say that the way things finish up for Joseph’s ‘love interest’ is not the way I would want things to finish up for any woman I know.

In a way I suppose my second major area of ambivalence mixed with tiredness at the familiarity of the theme is tied up with the first but it is specifically the elements of Joseph’s character which the author appeared to be putting under a microscope and, by omission, those he left unexplored. In the end this is basically a book about a bloke who believes himself in love with a prostitute, who happens to be extraordinarily beautiful, who he then attempts to rescue. Holland does expose Joseph’s self-righteousness and hypocrisy in an unflattering way but I found it troublesome that other issues were ignored, particularly the fact that the girl was 15 and Joseph 31 when they first met (they are 17 and 33 respectively when the action of the novel takes place). Again it is a case of me being weary of seeing such relationships depicted as normal by virtue of them not being remarked upon.

My final gripe is really only minor in comparison but I’m not convinced the novel is of the crime genre despite its heavy marketing that way. If it is it’s only in the broadest possible sense, in the way say that Ian McEwan’s ATONEMENT might be considered of the genre because there is a crime at the start of it. There are crimes in it but they do not really drive the story and, frankly, only those who’ve read precious little of the genre would be confounded by the mysterious element of the novel. I’m prepared to admit though that my acceptance of what is and isn’t crime fiction tends to be quite fluid and it’s not as if there’s an official standard which the book has failed to meet.

In the end then I found THE DARKEST LITTLE ROOM a troubling book on many levels, only some of which I imagine the author intended and I struggle to recommend it, despite the presence of excellent attributes. I want, absurdly I know, to prevent men from reading one more book in which they see it is basically OK to objectify women and to prevent women from reading one more book in which they are reminded that their second class status as human beings has not, where it counts, been wiped away by a few pieces of legislation. But of course whether you read the book or not those things will still be true.… (més)

When Grey North's mother dies giving birth to his sister, Grey vows to protect her as his father did not protect his mother. His alcoholic father accepts work away from home leaving Grey and Irene in the care of their grandmother. Irene develops an obsession for her big brother, waiting for him to come home of an evening and forming no friendships herself. When their Grandmother dies, they are left very poor and struggle to feed and clothe themselves. The occasional return home by their father, sees them both avoiding home as he drinks himself to oblivion. In this way the reader is familiarised with the landscape of Mary Smokes, a small town of less than 1000 inhabitants. A town that offers little hope of employment to the young people growing up there. However, the author expresses beautifully Grey's feelings for this place in a paragraph on page 69 -

'Grey was alone. He swam upstream and sank into the pool beneath the cradling spotted gum root and rested his arms and let the water crash over him. He laughed to himself at this inconsequential, late-night-creek-swimming small-town life. At such times all thoughts of leaving or anything else belonging to that still-distant place called the future left him alone. The world still moved slowly at Mary Smokes Creek. At the creek you took in the infinite and nameless changes in the hours, and moving at the same speed as the earth there was not that whiplash of time and the death feeling that came with hours lost unwittingly in degrees of waking sleep. At Mary Smokes Creek there was time for everything, and no desire to do anything at all.'
After his mothers death, Grey attaches himself to a group of disaffected boys, hence the title. They indulge in petty revenge and often anti-social behaviour and the reader is exposed to the criminal activities that can exist when times are hard. When Grey's father incurs a large gambling debt, Grey feels compelled to resort to theft to resolve the problem with unforeseen consequences.
This is a grim, yet poignant tale and the poetic writing which brings to life the landscape of Mary Smokes elevates this book and carries the reader along.… (més)