'Borderlines' by Charles Nicholl

Review by Alexander Turner

I was sitting on the banks of the Chao Phraya with James. It was pushing into dusk and the water was looking mauve with lurid green streaks. The lurid green streaks were courtesy of a small water's edge restaurant that had opted for an emerald look. We were standing on a jetty that felt like it could collapse at any moment. Every time a boat came near us it brought a wake that almost threw us into the unclean mess of Bangkok's mighty waterway.

James and I had met a few hours earlier in an off-Khao San Road restaurant. Actually restaurant might be too glorious a term for it. More like a table near a guest house where you could, if you had the patience of Job, get a bowl of noodles. I'd been in Bangkok all of three days and was coming round to the idea that I was in love with the town. We'd decided that we both wanted to get to Chinatown and given that neither of us knew anything about the layout of the town we may as well head off together.

James was a large built Australian who, back home, was a physiotherapist. In my mind physiotherapists were always large women with big arms and big hands who came along and hurt British comedy stars of the Sixties. But James was one of those laid back guys who just wanted to experience as much of life as possible.

I asked where else he had been.

"Spent a lot of time in East Africa, Kenya, Uganda."

"Liked it ?"

"Loved it. Poverty like you wouldn't believe but beautiful country. Beautiful. Sunsets like a kaleidoscope effect. You can see different coloured clouds just drifting across the sky. If you stay close to one of the big national parks you can hear the lions roar during the evening."

"Yeah. I know the feeling. I used to live about three blocks from Regents Park zoo"

"The only thing that pissed me off about Africa was all the bloody malaria."

"Malaria..."

"Caught it twice."

"You caught malaria twice."

"Nasty fucking thing."

"I imagine."

"I was lucky though. I had it treated both times. Nearly died the first time though. I was real sick. I can't describe it. You feel like your body's wasting away on you and you've got firebugs eating your head. You shit all the time. Puke all the time. Bloody awful. You think that the spray might work or the nets might work. But it ain't the big black mosquitoes that carry it. It's those little red buggers. I think they slip through the netting and like the taste of DDT. Wouldn't want to get that again."

"But you did get it again."

"Yeah."

"Was it not as bad the second time ?"

"It was worse."

"Yeah. I think I'll give Africa a miss."

"Ah you have to go there sometime. It's amazing. If you like Thailand you'll love Africa."

"No. Really. I'm not the adventurous type."

"What are you doing here then ? Bit far flung isn't it if you're not into adventure."

"Maybe... But have you ever read a book called Borderlines?"  

Borderlines opens with a train journey. Like all great travellers Charles Nicholl, the author, begins his journey alone. Travelling from Bangkok to Chiang Mai the train pulls into Lop Buri.

"I leaned out the window, the air was warm and dusty, lilac-coloured. The station was lit with sodium lights and the fires of fry stalls. The clatter of the train met the clatter of the platform, and further off I could hear the diffuse tinkling of temple bells."

He soon meets up with some fellow travellers. Khris an arrogant American who always seems to have had one beer too many hints of gems and adventure when he speaks of the enigmatic Harry. Harry, a French man of mixed Algerian gallic descent is guarded about his business and seems to distrust Nicholl on sight. This attitude is what seems to draw Nicholl to him and when Harry recommends a particular guest house in Chiang Mai it is at this guest house that Nicholl opts to stay.

As the plot unfolds Harry gradually starts to trust Nicholl although he never reveals his biggest secrets. That is something that a combination of common sense and other, more revealing sources, will have to supply the answers to.

When Khris takes off with some girl Harry finds himself short of a man to help him out with certain things. Always in search of a story and thinking Harry the best likely source Nicholl readily agrees to do Harry a favour. As it turns out all that this favour entails is picking up Harry's girlfriend from the station and taking her to an agreed destination. In return for this small favour Harry will take him into the Golden Triangle, into the parts that most tourists don't get to see, the parts where the borderlines of Laos, Burma, Thailand and China intersect, where warring factions vie for the largest slice of the opium trade pie.

From here Nicholl breaks in the story to tell of his arrival in Bangkok sharing a taxi with pudgy, luckless German Heinz. Heinz is in auto parts but speaks with a schoolboyish glee at his favourite little places in Bangkok. Heinz takes Nicholl for a predictable evening out on the town ending at the Malaysia hotel where Nicholl is staying. Nicholl seems a bit too easily upset by some of the sights of Patpong and it is in this slightly dour portrait of Bangkok that I part company with the book a little. Having said that the opening paragraph to the chapter is a real doozy:

"Thai girls, Thai girls: the words trip off the tongue in a way you just know they shouldn't. In Krung Thep, the City of Angels - known to the rest of the world as Bangkok - it begins before you've even had time to draw breath, begins as the taxi driver eases the car onto the freeway, rests his arm on the open window, and turns back to ask pleasantly, 'You want lay-dee?'"

I'll not spoil the story by saying what happens to Nicholl and Heinz at the Malaysia, apart from to say it involves a couple of almond-eyed smooth-skinned girls who claim to be students of Thammasat university, and a bucket load of disillusionment.

In the next chapter we return to Nicholl going to meet Harry's girlfriend, Katai. She becomes the true focus of the book and the hook by which Nicholl comes to really get to grips with Thai-ness and Thai culture. He almost certainly fell in love with her despite his insistence on remaining faithful to his wife. Like a great many Thai women I have known she is alive with conceits and treats the farang as somebody who just doesn't understand the way the world is.

Nicholl finds himself alone with her for longer than he expected as Harry has gone in search of his big deal. He travels to the border of Laos and Katai decides that they should swim across the Mekong so she can say she has visited a foreign country. However, on the way back they get caught up in a strong current and Katai nearly drowns. The shock makes her lose her khwan, a part of the spirit. "It's what we call khwan hai, Charlie. It is the losing of my spirit. It happen in the river The spirit inside us we call khwan. It is not our life spirit: this we call winjan. When the winjan goes we die. The khwan is something we might lose many times in our life. When you are sick, or when you have a big shock."

In order to get the khwan to return Katai must have a ceremony performed by the Mau Khwan (or Maw Khwan, Mor Khwan, if only there was one way of transliterating Thai words). The Mau Khwan must invoke the khwan with offerings before it will return to Katai's body. The Mau Khwan offers Nicholl an interesting insight into the philosophy behind this spiritual belief.

"When the khwan is gone, yes, you feel... depression. But look where it goes. It crosses a border into the spirit-world. And when it comes back, when it is called back into the soo khwan, it brings back the air and the touch of the spirit-world. We cannot go across that border yet, but our khwan can. To lose your khwan is very difficult, very dangerous even, but you must lose it. You must let it go, and pray that it will return."

After this ceremony Harry returns from his travels and Nicholl gets to walk close to the edge meeting opium harvesters and Shan rebels. He gets the story that Harry promised him but the real story is that of Harry and Katai themselves. The doomed nature of the relationship has a kind of familiar ring to anyone who knows Thailand. But this again is not something I would want to spoil for readers of the book.

When he parts company with Harry and Katai, Nicholl visits the forest temple. This strikes him as strangely anti-climactic. It has everything he expected to find including a teacher who is genuinely illumined, but he fails to find that something extra there. He fails to be illuminated himself. If such a thing takes place for him it is deep in the heart of something close to a war zone in Burma.

"So what? You're saying you came to Thailand because you read a book ?"

"No... No not really. I came to Thailand for a dozen reasons. I just got fed up of the way my life was going. I met a girl."

"There's always a girl."

"And things just weren't working out. I thought if I got as far away from it all as possible I might sort my head out."

"It'll do that all right."

The express boat pulled in. A limber Thai kid leapt off the boat on to the jetty. Whistles blew. Cautious old people waited for the point they thought the boat was nearest the land and then leapt like young people.

We let a few people go ahead of us and then leapt on the boat and chugged off uptown. A fine spray of water cut up against the side of the boat casting a short-lived rainbow into the sky. Most of our fellow travellers were Thai. They probably took this trip every day. White-shirted schoolgirls watched us and when we looked back they laughed as if caught doing something wicked, looking at farang.

Later on, that evening, after coming back to Khao San Road laden with fresh fruits, we took off with another guy to Patpong. Before this I had really believed my feelings and experiences might mirror those of Nicholl. Patpong rocked my little world and changed me forever. I had seen myself doing a few days in Bangkok and then taking off, like Nicholl, to Chiang Mai and the North. It never happened. I simply didn't react to the bar scene the way that Nicholl did. In fact it sucked me in and held me in its belly. But if I was recommending a book that preserved the flavour of what Thailand is I still can't think of a better book than this one.

Borderlines by Charles Nicholl 1988
PP 238
Copy reviewed (Picador books)
Currently out of print but available all over Banglampoo

Review: Alexander Turner 2001

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Here's some links from ThailandStories.com for those readers of JagoTurner's book review to find more info and possibly purchase the book reviewed:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9780140095906

http://www.amazon.com/Borderlines-journey-Thailand-Charles-Nicholl/dp/0436309807