Reviews

Review of Shadowed Country

By Peter Manningford Bohune

Shadowed Country is undeniably Pira Canning Sudham’s acme in the craft of writing. Since his early years of reading English literature in universities in New Zealand and Australia, Sudham has been craftily practising his art, deftly employing the English language to impart internationally vital messages in People of Esarn, Tales of Thailand and Monsoon Country. The latter is the first book of Shadowed Country. Much is tacitly done, of course, while he courageously covers actual occurrences. He seems to say: "The wicked and the corrupt, who have been able to get away even with murders, must not escape the net." Widely he casts his punitive net. He also draws from personal experiences in such a way that reality fuses with imagination, making it appear that Shadowed Country is the author’s biography in disguise.

In modern literature, reality fiction is on the increase. In this regard, Pira Canning Sudham is a leader of the pack. He goes so far as to use photos with appropriate captions to illustrate the texts, seemingly saying: "See? These happenings are true. Some of the characters are real people." In so doing, he may be able to attract those who normally do not read fiction.

On the other hand, if using recent historical facts, particularly when some perpetrators are still alive, is a crime, then the author has indeed taken a great risk. In Shadowed Country, Sudham puts words in the protagonist Prem Surin’s mouth: "I have put my life on the line" in portraying in flesh and blood and naming names the immensely wealthy crooks, drug traffickers, money-launders, ambitious generals, greedy politicians, ruthless entrepreneurs in lieu of mere finger-pointing, hiding behind innuendoes.

Sudham sees himself as the little David of Thailand who has to face Goliath alone. But the shadowed country has far more than one wicked giant. To combat these omnipotent dark lords, he wisely keeps them far apart so as to fight them one at a time. However there is a rich seam that runs through Shadowed Country. It is the Siamese style of education system employed as an apparatus to stunt and maim the mind of the young so as to turn them into silent, subservient and unthinking citizens. According to Sudham, subservience and mindlessness permit corruption to progress steadily, enabling the supreme Dark Lord "to expand greatly and govern ruthlessly without challenge, without trammels."

Prem Surin’s fight against this particular Goliath begins when he returns to his home village towards the end of The Force of Karma. In Napo, he builds a school to teach the village children and "to counter the age-old authoritarian teaching and rote learning" with a devotion to nurturing the growing minds and so help the eager students become thinking individuals. He determines that their formative minds must not be stunted or deformed as his had been. He believes that "a wholesome and well-developed mind is a wonderful gift one can give to another human being."

It is obvious that Sudham sorely regrets his own "crippled mind," making Prem Surin vow in Monsoon Country to remain unwedded so that his flesh and blood would not go through the mind-maiming education system. But then, in The Force of Karma, a descendant was purposely conceived. Lady Pamela Archisson (formerly Elizabeth Durham) carries this conception and gives birth to Prem’s son, not only to inherit’s Surin’s massive family fortune in England but also to be far away from the grip of the Dark Lord that has an immense hold on the shadowed country. As a British subject, Priam Archisson is to grow up in the UK to gain a mental development of which the biological father was unfortunately deprived.

Obviously Shadowed Country is a product of 45 years of using English to deliver fascinating accounts of Thai life in both urban and rural areas. It is remarkable that his use of crisp, clear English, is subtly imbued with poetic qualities, reading like a gentle flow of a cool clear mountain stream. It is a good, open texture of language that paints vivid and long-retained images in our minds, that carries his messages best of all. Yet, in closer study, Sudham’s style of writing seems deceptive; it hides complexity behind spurious simplicity. Seemingly he takes English in easy stride.

But such achievement did not come easily to the former Isan buffalo-boy. The road that takes him to become a master of the English language and to be a thinking man and an artist has undoubtedly exacted from him a great sacrifice. It has also cost him thirty years of odyssey in New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, Germany, Switzerland and the UK. Even now he spends six months a year of self-imposed exile in England "to read more, hear more and to reflect from afar."

Shadowed Country is also Sudham’s Herculean labour of love. He assiduously wrote and revised and refined time and again both Monsoon Country and its sequel, The Force of Karma over the years. "Before they could become Shadowed Country, the two books have taken me altogether forty five years," said Sudham. "They evolve along with me or vice versa."

The book pertains to the report that in 2004 two magnificent stately homes in southern county of England worth over 30 million pounds had become properties of Prem Surin, a son of impoverished Isan peasants. Having inherited the two English country houses, the "wild man" from the morass of Siam told a journalist: "Ashdown Hall has been our family seat for centuries. I am destined to return and protect it from falling into the wrong hands. It is beyond me to save Siam from the take-over but the family seat must not go the same way while it is within my power to protect it. As for Warleigh Manor, the previous owner, Charles Keith Tregonning, pinched my silver when he was my butler in the other life. In this life, he merely gave back what had been mine plus interest at the rate of 13 per cent APR – whatever that is – of which the Lord has kept account from an actual time of pilferage up to now which would be 135 years."

Having whetted our curiosity and, at the same time, challenged our concept of reincarnation, Sudham starts the saga with a prologue that portrays in sequences the life of an English peer, the 5th Marquess, who lay dying in the State Bedroom of Ashdown Hall.

Sudham suggests there is a link between the demise of the Marquess and the ignoble birth of an infant in a poor and remote Isan village. "Where else in the world, if it is not Isan? There, the tormented soul of the peer of the realm, 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 further retribution due to his karma. It has to be in Isan where, not only the body would be malnourished, prone to diseases and brutal treatments, but also the mind could be deprived and tortured by a mind-maiming education system," said Sudham.

From the "morass of Siam," the "seething base of the hierarchy," the author opportunely exposes the social condition that subjugates and impoverishes the powerless population on the one hand and the authoritative education system that enforces rote learning and suppression to stunt formative minds in order to turn the young into submissive, silent and mindless mass on the other.

But before Prem Surin (the 5th Marquess of Wealden in the previous life) could reclaim Ashdown Hall and inherit Warleigh Manor in this life, Pira Canning Sudham leads us to explore penurious Prem’s torturous childhood in his home village. There, on the Korat Plateau, Prem takes care of the family’s herd of buffaloes, suffering malnutrition, brutality and abuse.

Among numerous enthralling episodes, a startling scene in which a sodomite, Peng Pakpoom, forces Prem Surin to be on his knees so as to be "wounded," is seared and branded upon our hearts. Prem undergoes further bullies, brutal treatments, rejections, vilification, misunderstanding, rote learning as retribution for his bad karma from the previous life. We follow the maligned boy to Bangkok and later as a student on a scholarship to London and Munich and eventually his return to Napo to our delight, sorrow and fascination while the soul of the born again to suffer the force of karma Marquess of Wealden’s reincarnated life goes through the karmic cycle in the form of a poverty stricken Isan peasant from the lowest of the low.

Pira Canning Sudham cunningly exploits a belief in karma and harsh social condition to give insight into Siamese life, revealing the horror and magnitude of injustice and corruption in the society that is "rotten at the core, to fall eventually on its own accord," 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 the shadowed country named Siam."

The book leaves little room for us to guess what "the fall" is and what cause brings about that fall and who make the take-over. The exploration yields plenty. The rewards include the blow-by-blow account of the massacres of thousands of pro-democracy protesters in the streets of Bangkok, the murders of numerous idealistic schoolteachers and environmental activists, graft, sex trade, drug trafficking, money laundering, a pernicious plot code-named DDT, corruptive forces and various forms of corruption.

Pira Canning Sudham admirably deals with such stark, gross or painful subject matters with poetic narrative that has become one of the most remarkable writings of modern literature. "I want to turn pain and sorrow into art," he said. Shadowed Country stands to prove that he has succeeded.

Peter Manningford Bohune