Siriworn Kaewkan, The Murder Case of Tok Imam Storpa Karde, 2006

There are very few novels that explore the separatist terrorism affecting the three small Thai provinces that border Malaysia, and this one, shortlisted for the 2006 SEA Write Award, quickly became required reading that year with an English translation following four years later. So who killed the much-loved imam in the small village of Tanyong Baru, right outside his own mosque? Terrorists or State officials? Soldiers or police? Is there a suspicious connection with a neighbouring Buddhist village? And why are the villagers closing their doors to an actual investigation? The reader’s guess is as good as anyone elses, which indicates the clever structure of this tale of deflections and half-truths that inevitably views the subject from an outsider’s perpective yet at the same time lets the story’s participants speak (seemingly, often less than thruthfully) for themselves. Kaewkan simply provides the necessary pieces to the jigsaw then lets the readers assemble it in a way that indicates there’s an inevitable collective madness going on here. There are a number of possible courses of events discernable if this short novel is read closely, which is easily done in one sitting – just don’t expect a straightforward whodunnit.

Sabai Muang, The Call of the Midnight Hour, 1993

Sabai Muang is one of the many pseudonyms of the Thai author Sukanya Cholasueks, and The Call of the Midnight Hour is one of five novels she wrote on each of the Five Precepts of Buddhism. The Third Precept here is that of abstaining from sexual misconduct and is the story of Phatta, who abducts another man’s wife and suffers the consequences but also obtains a rather unusual redemption. Set in India at the time of the birth of Buddhism, Muang’s story has supernatural elements which muddy the waters of what is otherwise a very clear storyline, and towards the end it splits into two threads that separate what is going on with Phatta’s soul in the spiritual world and what is happening with his body in the real world, but these are blurred in such a way that it may become difficult to tell what was happening where, and with whom. If the other four short novels are also published in English they will probably be worth reading as well as this was well written, even if I felt at times that it was either too straightforward in places or a little too abstract.  PY

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