BANGKOK -- In Emma Larkin's wonderfully imaginative and realistically detailed novel, Bangkok is a place intent on burying its own skeletons: political, historical and economic, the skeletons are lying, forgotten, in the swampy land on which gleaming high-rise buildings shoot up to the sky to proclaim the victory of willful oblivion. They are carcasses discarded by Thai authoritarianism and sucked deeper under earth, as has happened in the past three decades, by the inexorable force of capitalism.
"Comrade Aeon's Field Guide to Bangkok" is an achievement on many fronts. As a novel, it skips along without missing a beat between keen-eyed observation and offhand humor, between sober commentary and playful imagination. As an attempt to capture the chaotic DNA of Thailand's capital, Larkin, a longtime resident, manages to find a metaphorical convergence among the city's diverse inhabitants and the hierarchical pecking order they enjoy -- or endure.
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