Reviews

Review of Shadowed Country

By Peter Manningford Bohune

Shadowed Country is without a doubt Pira Canning Sudham’s acme in the craft of writing. He deserves the accolade of being a master storyteller in the English language. Since his years of being a student of English literature in his twenties, Sudham has been craftily practising his art, deftly employing the language to impart internationally his vital messages as well as being able to hold the reader’s attention throughout. He makes it difficult to put the book down.

Obviously Shadowed Country is a product of 40 years of using English to deliver fascinating accounts of Thai life in both urban and rural areas. It is remarkable that his use of direct, crisp, clear prose should be so poetically flowing and highly effective. He takes the language in easy stride, having obtained the absolute command.

Shadowed Country is the end result of Sudham’s Herculean labour of love, of writing and revising and expanding both Monsoon Country and its sequel, The Force of Karma. "Before it could become Shadowed Country, the two books have taken me altogether forty five years," said Sudham. "It has evolved along with me or vice versa."

We were told that in 2004 two magnificent stately homes in southern county of England worth millions of pounds had become properties of Prem Surin, a son of impoverished Isan peasants. Really? How?

Having whetted our curiosity, Sudham starts the saga with a prologue that reflects in sequences the life of an English peer, the 5th Marquess as he lay dying in the State Bedroom of Ashdown Hall, the family seat.

Sudham pertains that there is a link between the demise of the English nobleman and the birth of a baby boy in the remote and poor Isan village called Napo. "Where else in the world, if it is not Isan? There, the tormented soul of the noble lord, who had been held responsible for the massacre of hundred of natives in Ayodaya, in northern India, during the British Raj era, must continue to undergo the retribution due to his past horrible deed. It has to be in Isan so that not only his body would become frail, puny and prone to disease, defilement and brutal treatments, but also his mind could be deprived, stunted and maimed according to the force of karma," said Sudham.

Thus, the author goes on to expose the deplorable social condition that impoverishes the powerless population on the one hand, and the authoritative educational system that enforces rote learning and suppression to cripple formative minds in order to turn the young into submissive, silent and mindless mass, on the other.

But before the protagonist Prem Surin (the 5th Marquess of Wealden in the previous life) could return to reclaim Ashdown Hall and inherit Warleigh Manor in this life, the author leads us to explore Surin’s penurious childhood in his home village, where he takes care of the family’s herd of buffaloes on the Korat Plateau. There, on the barren plain, Peng Pakpoom, the brutal leader of the Napo buffalo-boys abused Prem, the unprotected weakling. We followed Prem to Bangkok and later to London and Munich and his return to Napo with delight and excitement and fascination as the damned, "born again to suffer the retribution" Marquess’s torturous life dictates.

Pira Canning Sudham cunningly exploits such life’s cycle and social condition to give insight of Thai life as well as to reveal the horror and magnitude of injustice and corruption in society. He seems to say: "Come with me. Together we’ll explore dark caverns, mysterious avenues and perilous highways and byways that lead to the take-over not only of England’s treasure troves but also of a shadowed country named "Siam."

The exploration yields plenty. The prize includes riveting accounts of the massacres of thousands of pro-democracy protesters in the streets of Bangkok, the murders of idealistic and courageous schoolteachers and environmental activists all over Thailand, graft, sex trade, drug trafficking, money laundering, a pernicious plot code-named DDT, corruptive forces and various forms of corruption. Sudham admirably deals with such stark, gross and painful subject matters with poetic narrative that has become one of the most remarkable writings of modern literature. That is understandable since he is primarily a poet.

Peter Manningford Bohune