The argument that found its way into The Forgiven

I moved to Bangkok ten years ago in order to be in a place where nothing happens, where no one knew me and where nothing cost very much. A decade on, after a military coup, running street battles between protestors and soldiers, a ceaseless social life and costs reaching about the same levels as Brooklyn, I have retained at least one of my original reasons for leaving New York: radio silence relative to events in my far-off ‘career’ on the other side of the world. This month my novel about Hong Kong, On Java Road, came out, and so did the film version of an earlier novel, The Forgiven. The principal response outside of reviews has been three death threats postmarked China.

It is monsoon here, the rains coming in at 5 p.m. every day, and I have set up a desk on my balcony overlooking an improvised banana plantation in the waste lot next to my building. Apparently the government has introduced a tax break for bananas, so everyone is growing them. The old ladies on neighbouring balconies have set up little shrines filled with aubergines to appease Rahu the God of the Eclipse, and it has to be said that from the perspective of such homely and cosmic realities, a movie and a novel are pretty insignificant blips in the general flow of life. This morning my maid gravely informed me that the 15th-floor passageways were infested with ghosts and that today I had better stay indoors. Which is fine, because the monsoon is perfect for long daytime sleeps and nobody is calling me.

Nevertheless news arrives over the internet wires, ghostly in its own way. A schoolfriend has taken a picture of a poster of The Forgiven curved into a wall of the Underground. As a kid going to school I used to wonder what it felt like to have your name on one of those sinister walls, and now I could find out. Alas, I couldn’t actually see mine because it was too small. It was wedged somewhere in the middle of the bottom scrabble of minor credits, the insignificance of the contemporary writer once again elegantly affirmed. The appeal of cinema to me has always been its similarity to an imagined afterlife, its characters belonging to a parallel world that is like ours but which is not ours. If it’s too like ours, we get bored. But I wondered if this was, in reality, as good as it would get: a tiny acknowledgement at the bottom of a poster in a Tube station. It’s fine with me.

All the same, during my monsoon sleeps I’ve been thinking back to the shooting of the movie in Morocco in early 2020, just before it was almost aborted by Covid. One day I was watching Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain climb a flight of steps in the kasbah. The streets had been cleared and hundreds of people were on the rooftops gawping at Jessica in silence. The pair spoke some lines from the book as they climbed, and I recognised them as lines I had written years before during a snowstorm in New York after a bitter period of my life. That whole era came flooding back but in the strangest way. Further back, in 2000, I had gone to Erfoud in the Sahara to investigate child labour in fossil quarries and had holed up with a French girlfriend during a sandstorm. Sand and snow had merged in my memory and meanwhile John McDonagh, the director, had gone to the same village and found, as I imagined, the very hotel where my companion and I had once screamed at each other and thrown teacups across the room. Jessica later asked me who her character was based on and I merely related the above, not knowing what else to say. In that moment it became clear that perhaps writers don’t really know where their material comes from and that it’s better that they don’t.

After concluding with satisfaction that I have indeed stayed in all day away from the phantoms on the 15th floor, my maid is making me a Thai dinner while merrily assuring me that ‘farangs’ like myself cannot possibly enjoy Thai food. I ask her why this is, in Thai. ‘Because,’ she says, ‘you cannot speak Thai or taste like we do.’ ‘But,’ I say, ‘we are speaking Thai now and you are making me gai yang like you do every night.’ Yes, she asserts calmly, but that doesn’t mean that you can really understand or taste like a Thai. You are just pretending. And in a way, she is right. Just as she is right about the ghost of the Chinese millionaire who lingers around the service elevator. He, in her eyes, is in a sense more real than me because at least he is not pretending. ‘Besides,’ she adds, and it is not for the first time, ‘I know what you do for a living. You make books and movies. So you are pretending all the time. You just don’t know it yet.’