Violence has long flowed under Bangkok’s surface

Three years ago I sat down to write a novel set in my adopted home city. Placing its claustrophobic action in the near future, I had no trouble imagining my mostly foreign characters haplessly trapped inside a decaying high-rise apartment complex and surrounded by political upheaval. Thailand has endured more military coups since 1945 than any nation on Earth, and I myself have lived through two, in 2006 and 2014, while the violent uprising of 2010 occurred while I was far away in New York. They are peculiar coups by world standards. Two Turkish friends who visited in 2014 were disgusted by the lack of tear gas and fatalities inflicted by air power. ‘You call this a coup?’ they asked. True, there was a lot of bad dancing in the streets, and because the protestors were pro-establishment the police were nowhere to be seen. Nevertheless, violence flows under the surface in Bangkok. And often well above it. Unresolved conflicts swirl around the country’s institutions.

My characters (living in my actual building) peered out of windows and heard distant detonations, lone rifle shots, sirens, cries along darkened streets. Those too had been easily remembered. In 2014, a bomb tossed into ex-prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva’s compound, next to which I happen to live, buckled my windows while I was sitting on the balcony enjoying my evening G&T. No one killed, thankfully, but foreign writer rattled. But what’s a grenade or two between neighbours? All the same, when The Glass Kingdom was finally published this year, the future events cryptically evoked in my novel began to actually transpire. Your correspondent is no prophet, however. The events now unfolding were all too easy to predict. Since the military seized power six years ago strange moods have simmered under a severe regime of censorship and intimidation.