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.