Lee Fowler is better known, to me at least, as the founder of the Thomas Imposter label which brought so many great Japanese bands - Dead Bambies, Astro-B, Goofy18, to name a few - to wider attention. No surprise, then, that his novel is rooted in his cultural experiences in the far east, where he's lived for many years. There are even nods to his 'other' self: the main character's name is Thomas Impey and a Dead Bambies t-shirt even makes an appearance at one point.
If Impey is in some respects - though certainly not in others - an 'innocent abroad' thrust out of necessity into a hostile world of drug-trafficking, the characters governing his fate appear to have left their innocence way behind in the past, if they ever had it in the first place: the sleazy Phil, whose 'body defied science', the intoxicatingly dangerous Yuki, who dangles the thread on which his increasingly precarious fate hangs, plus an array of gangsters whose terrifying clutches he is forced to dodge as he makes his way from Japan to Thailand and, he hopes, back again.
And yet it's those characters who display at least a vestige of innocence that Impey - and Fowler - seem most inclined to preserve. If Impey himself has antihero tendencies, his character is redeemed by his increasingly honest reflections on his treatment of the young student Kumiko: the trajectory of his character development sees him arriving at the realisation that he cannot see her as the architect of his failed teaching career but as someone he treated in much the same way as those loathsome forces surrounding him would, given the chance. The treatment of the Thai transsexual, abused by her London businessman boyfriend, is similarly pivotal, as is the warning contained in the sticky end the Londoner comes to.
What's most impressive about the novel is its pace, which carries the reader through Thomas' breathless quest giving us little option but to find ourselves similarly propelled. The destructive tsunami that is both the greatest threat to Thomas' life and the means for his escape feels like the key metaphor around which the novel is wrapped. The main character constantly has the wave at his back but it is, ultimately, a wave that can envelope others too, whatever their moral compass or lack thereof.
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