When I was a child one of my favourite books was ‘My Family and Other Animals’ by the naturalist, Gerald Durrell. His account of his pre-World War 2 childhood on the Greek island of Corfu was fascinating and enchanting. I loved the fact that he was surrounded by interesting and eccentric friends and relatives as well as by a whole host of animals and birds.

I always wanted to have loads of different animals when I was a child, but because I grew up in a city, that wasn’t possible. I did have eccentric friends and relatives – some of them quite off the scale even by Gerald Durrell’s standards – but not, of course, amid the bright sunlight of a Greek island. East London in the 1960s and 70s was more of a light drizzle sort of environment.

Later, as a teenager, I discovered the work of Gerald’s older brother, the novelist, Lawrence Durrell. Right from the off, I was hooked. I think it took me less than a fortnight to read ‘The Alexandria Quartet’ and I then went on to devour everything else in Lawrence’s catalogue. The intensity of the writing, the odd and often borderline abusive relationships that he described and the lush evocations of places both familiar and unfamiliar bewitched my soul. That a girl from a working class background should be so taken by tales of louche diplomatic and artistic types having affairs and exploring literary forms in places like Cairo, Avignon and Alexandria was, I guess, unusual. But then I think that probably the nature of the characters and their locations in space were probably irrelevant. What got me was the notion of people exploring.

Lawrence Durrell’s ‘Quartet’ novels are often described as ‘flawed masterpieces’. The four-part form is applauded but the result often, some feel, falls short of the original artistic intent. I am no literary critic but my feeling on the matter is that even to attempt such a thing was an act of both bravery and genius. But then that was what Durrell and his literary friends and acquaintances did.

Not all of their ideas and explorations were influential or even quite sane. Whilst staying with Durrell and his family in Corfu the author Henry Miller decided that he wanted to rebel against the tyranny of clothes by walking around in the hot Greek summer stark naked. I can’t necessarily see why anyone would want to risk such comprehensive and catastrophic sunburn, but I do applaud his effort. Why not give that a go? Why not write a massive great tome detailing a significant parcel of time from four different points of view? This, to me, is what the progression of art is all about. Exploration! When I was a very small child I wanted to be an Egyptologist and dig around in the sands of the Valley of the Kings and discover… What? Actually it didn’t matter very much. I just wanted to discover something wonderful and amazing, something that would allow me to learn a fact that, to me, was new and shiny and told me a whole previously unknown thing about the world.

As writers, whether we plough a literary or a genre fiction furrow, it is I believe incumbent upon us never to stop exploring. There is no subject that cannot be looked at, no form that can be dismissed as irrelevant, pointless or stupid. I am just about to start on my latest Çetin İkmen book that will take my character into pastures that he has never explored before. Not only will he be working in ways he has never even dreamed about, he will be meeting people and going to places he cannot even have imagined. Both his ‘life’ and mine will, I hope, be enriched by this. I hope also, very much, that the book will be a huge success. This will be for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which will be because I will have moved Çetin, and myself, on. I may not have ever found a new and fabulous tomb underneath the sands of Egypt, I may never have eschewed the tyranny of clothes, but I’m still in there trying to do new and exciting things with my fiction. So big thanks for that, as well as hours and hours of wonderful prose, to the two late Durrell brothers, Gerald and Lawrence.

I was five minutes into writing a heated open riposte in response to the ludicrous, scandalous, slanderous blob posted by the Moore bloke on Friday. Of course I had to clear it with the dogs. You can’t leap into a lawsuit without consulting the injured parties. Every coconut monkey knows that. But, after a two-hour video conference (Gogo’s on a lecture tour in Malaysia), they won me around. As they said, perpetuating the myth that dogs have no memory, conscience, social skills, minds, logic or political standpoint, might not be such a bad thing come the revolution. Sticky pointed out quite succinctly that those who think they’re in control are the easiest to pull from their pedestals. He demonstrated how to get a good jaw hold around the left ankle.

But that leaves me short of a blob for this week. So I have no choice but to tell you of another disturbing event. If anybody’s actually reading these blobs, he and/or she may recall that two weeks yonder I was forced to become a feature for a rather hunky internationally-known newspaper. Despite the fact that the journalist had a perfectly functional camera embedded in his cell-phone, he insisted on flying a photographer down to take a few snaps. (You need a pretty good parachute to get to our place by plane.) Now, I happen to know that due to great strides in technology over the past few years, a squid could take a photograph that, ten years ago would have won the Pulitzer for feature photography. With my little Kodak, I personally have taken several excellently artistic pictures for my ‘Yucky Things I Find on the Beach’ gallery which caused quite a stir in Flotsam and Jetsam monthly. So why send a real photographer? I tell you. The UNION. The professional photographer’s union is second only to the Teamsters in the bodies in concrete boots league. They look after their own and I got the feeling the journalist might have had a little accident if he’d gone ahead and snapped me with his cell-phone. KnowwhadImean?

Because of his obvious mob connections I was determined not to like Justin. Yeah, ‘Justin’. Name like that, gotta be gay, right? Nothing worse than a gay mobster. I still have nightmares about that scene in Fame where Irene Cara’s lured into the bedroom by a sleazy photographer/videographer.

“Colin, sweetie. Just slip off that shoulder strap, will you? Super. Teensy bit lower. Lovely.”

There’d be erotic pictures of me posted all over the web. I’d be humiliated over and over again like Paris. So, it came as a surprise to learn that Justin was 7ft 2 and hairy. He drank beer and the dogs liked him. (They discussed Faust deep into the night). But all that made his mob connections even more ominous. How could I refuse his ‘suggestions’? Tell me how many of the following I would have considered if my photographer didn’t have a baseball bat in his camera bag:

Up to my waist in jellyfish infested water? Covered in red ants as I dangled from a tree? Beating my way through jungle using my teeth as a machete? ‘Just one quickie’ up against a factory wall surrounded by armed Burmese? Right, National Geographic photo spread, you say. Justin took 805 photographs of me. That’s eight more than they took at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. And, do you know how many they’ll use? One. And you just know that’ll be the one of me at my desk writing with my Nobel prize slightly out of focus in the background. Eight hours of extreme posing and nothing but insect bites and second-degree sunburn to show for it.

We considered locking him in the cellar with the others but we decided Justin was just following orders. In fact he was a nice guy…for a 7ft 2 gay mobster.

I am back from the country hovel at Eel Swamp. For nearly a week I had mud, water and shit midway up my wellies. It is the Monsoon season. Rain or shine, spending time with animals is a good thing. Animals have a lot to teach us. Here are a couple of observations from studying my five dogs and two ducks. First, animals aren’t divided into religion let alone into religious sects that target rivals like insurgents setting IEDs for the next Humvee to roll over. Second, animals don’t hang out with each other because of a share ideology. They have no real politics to speak of. Like religion, politics, is simply absent from their day. You may protest that animals aren’t rational, don’t have logic or analysis working for them. True enough but at the same time animals never consult astrologers before making a decision.

Of course, you’re going to point out that dogs form packs with a pecking order. Yes, that is true. But the top dog doesn’t promise change you can believe in, or health care or daycare for puppies. Might is right keeps the pecking order a well-oiled machine. Life is basically sniffing each others asses and urine trails, eating, begging for food in between meal time, sleeping. And Oscar, the Lab, sometimes picks up his ball, brings it to me, I throw it, he looks at the ball and at me with those large, sad eyes, as if to say, “Why did you do that? Now I’ve got to wander over in my old sweet time, lift a leg to keep the urine trail fresh, have a nice drink of water, and yeah, ‘Why was I going over here?’ He often forgets the ball destination. For dogs it is all journey. They have no real destination to speak of. They happily travel with nothing remotely equivalent to our world of frequent flier points as an incentive.

Dogs, as far as we know, despite the dialogue above, have no interior monologue going on. Dogs aren’t Hamlet. They don’t argue with themselves. They don’t suffer doubt, make holiday plans, worry about growing old or whether global warming will cause their urine trails to dry into nothingness. In other words, dogs have no conception of the future. That alone relieves them of huge anxiety. Marlowe, who is 14 years old, is going deaf, his eyes are clouded, he’s slower in getting to his feet, and he’s still nursing a hernia resulting from a fight over a bitch. But Marlowe behaves pretty much the same way as he did when he was one year old. He has no perception that he’s an old man, and that fighting other, younger members of the pack, over a woman at 91 years old (in human years) is bound to be a losing battle. Dogs don’t know their limitations.

It’s not just the future that dogs are oblivious to thinking about, it is also the past that eludes them. Elephants may have a memory for slights and rough treatment but dogs have no such memory. Yell at them, and an hour later, they wag their tails, and lick your hand. Forget to feed them, and, hey, no hard feelings. None of that boiling up rage over what someone did a day, a week, or years ago. My dogs don’t wait in the dark to knife someone who caused them to lose face. I love dogs because they seem free of the kind of delusionary thinking that passes for day-to-day human mental activity. In their lives, they don’t need wire taps, guided missile, loyalty oath, preachers, assault helicopters, GPS, Internet, Twitter or Facebook.

A dog looks in the mirror and doesn’t know it is looking at itself. There’s something to be said for lack of awareness of self. Because it is our sense of self and sense of time that, from a dog’s point of view, could be more usefully spent tending a urine trail and looking for food. Dogs don’t write anything down. Because they basically don’t need to remember a lot of stuff, and they don’t have to search where they last left their reading glasses or car keys. Dogs are both freer than we are even though from our point of view they are locked in a mental prison with no possibility of escape. Life is filled with these trade offs. Knowledge is the devil that spins us like a top. It equips us through books, movies, folklore and myth to face a more complicated mental world where we are convinced the stakes are much higher. We suffer from knowing too much, from our inability to easily forget or forgive, and from entangled emotions and intellect that fight like two overtired mud wrestlers, with the battle ever shifting and never ending.

Things like face, revenge, the past and the future, are so much part of the human species, that we marvel having animals around us that are happy, content, and playful, day after day, in the absence of such mental processes. Years ago, Thais frequently would tell a foreigner, “Thinking too much is no good. It gives you a headache.” I haven’t heard any Thais saying that lately. A lot of them seem to have a headache.

Sanuk or fun and sabai or feeling comfortable are also standard Thai ways of being. Or so it was in the past. You don’t hear many Thais talking about sanuk or feeling sabai. It’s because they’re too busy thinking too much. We laugh at dogs because they lick their balls (at least my four male dogs do) and fail to laugh at ourselves for constantly licking our emotional wounds, real or imagined, not to heal them but to remind us of our enemies, to reinforce our rage, and to plot our payback.

When I am away from Eel Swamp and the animals, I soon leave their world and float back into the human world of Bangkok. The thing about my dogs, is they never leave their world, not for a moment, because that is only the place they live, in the moment, and I envy them for being content to be in that big Now.

As for the two ducks, that is for another blog. Here’s a preview: The Klong Toey market duck (the white one) bought as a wife for the existing duck at the pond in Eel Swamp may turn out to be a male. No one at Eel Swamp has made a physical examination to determine the duck’s gender. Ducks are hard to catch. But that may not be necessary. My mother-in-law dismisses the need for such an examination. “Leave the duck alone,” she says. She says a duck’s gender is determined by the tone and timbre of its quack. Gender floats to the surface by examining the voice register. In her mind a female duck’s musicality is as distinct as Mozart is from the Rolling Stones.

There is no gynecologist near Eel Swamp to confirm or deny the white duck’s gender. The household is betting she is a ‘she’ though the odds vary day to day, depending on latest reports on her tone scales. This isn’t Julie Andrews singing the Sound of Music theme song. There’s a lot of variation on a theme in the white duck’s quacks. The gardener has made a side bet that the white duck is a katoey.

Next week: The Strange Case of Duck Gender at Eel Swamp.

Last week in this (cyber)space, I started to explain why I’ve turned to historical fiction, after previously writing a book of nonfiction and my four Palestinian crime novels. I wrote that historical fiction casts today’s deepest issues in an unexpected (historical) context and can therefore make us see them anew. It’s also a dramatic way of posing timeless questions, including the sacrifices that must be made for love.

Naturally I’ve been doing a lot of reading in historical fiction. It’s part of what made me want to write about Mozart and Caravaggio, rather than Caravaggio, my Palestinian sleuth. Mostly I find those historical works inspiring. From the class of Hilary Mantel’s French Revolution novel “A Place of Greater Safety” to the brilliant grittiness of “Libra,” Don Delillo’s Lee Harvey Oswald story.

But there are times when I see flaws in the way history is used by some writers in the genre. Instead of digging deep for the drama of a historical period, they go for the most obvious kind of drama.

Take Jews, for instance.

A few months ago, I was reading a rather flabby novel about the Great Siege of Malta in 1565. The arch-Catholic Knights of the Order of Saint John are engaged in a death struggle against the hordes of the Ottoman Sultan. Then suddenly into the midst of the book sails a subplot about crypto-Jews hiding in a cave on the island. They befriend a Maltese girl who, in turn, tries to persuade the Grand Master of the Knights to save the Jews. In reality, the Knights would’ve imprisoned the Jews and ransomed them to the Jewish community of Venice, but that isn’t what got on my nerves.

Rather it was that Jews make for an easy hit of emotion and drama for writers of historical fiction. Just as contemporary writers go for 9/11-related themes when they want to invest their bland narratives with broad, inspirational impact. It’s reaching for a topic that isn’t yours, that doesn’t touch you, just because it’ll make your work seem important and weighty. Instead of delving deeper into their spiritual reservoir, these historical novelists toss in a Jew, spin a few quotes from the Talmud, and face the Jews off against some averagely seething anti-Semite. Bingo, a plot with vim.

What’s more, the Jews of these novels are entirely flat. That’s because they aren’t there due to any burning connection felt by the author. They’re just plot twisters tossed in for cheap drama. In combination with today’s political correctness, that’s why the Jews in these historical novels come across as such absolute good guys. After hundreds of years of the reverse treatment, maybe it’s time Jews got an angelic rap. But they can’t all have been nice guys who only wanted to study the holy books and keep kosher, can they? Yet most contemporary historical fiction shows them that way. (I’ve lived in Jerusalem 14 years, and I’ve met a few who weren’t quite such prizes.)

I’ve written a historical novel set in Vienna in 1791 which will be out next year. It’s about Mozart. There are no Jews in it. I’m completing the manuscript of another Jewless historical novel even as I write these lines. It’s about Caravaggio. Believe me, I could’ve taken the easy way out and dropped in a suffering Jew—after so many years in Jerusalem I know a few things about Judaism and the sufferings of the Jews who live here today. But it shouldn’t be hard work to find drama in wild historical times, often with more depth, once you look beyond the obvious torment of the Jews.

I like to make it hard for myself. That’s also what makes it real.

İstanbul used to have some mad and spectacular backpacker “hotels” back in the day. One of my favourites was in Yerebatan Street right in the heart of the old city, Sultanahmet district. It was called the Hotel Stop and it was the kind of place where anything could happen at any time and for any number of reasons – few of them logical.

The owners of the Stop were a family originally from eastern Turkey who were some of the kindest, most caring and most ambitious people I have ever met. The building itself, which was probably built sometime in the 1920s or 30s was riddled with damp and probably every type of wood rot known to man. It was dingy, the plumbing was beyond eccentric and every time you turned on a light you took your life in your hands.

Cuts in mains water supply used to happen a lot in İstanbul, a phenomenon not always easily understood by tourists from Western Europe, the USA, Canada and Australasia. Whenever the water went off at the Stop there was always a roar of fury from those halfway through washes or trying to flush the toilet. I once got caught covered in soap, not a drop of water in sight, in what was laughingly called the shower room. This was a vast hymn to cracked tiles dominated by a massive cylindrical boiler that looked not unlike a 1950s B movie version of a spacecraft. This thing could, with help, be persuaded to emit a thin, lukewarm trickle of water from the object you were encouraged to call its ‘shower attachment’. But only with the window wide open. If you didn’t do that you’d die of carbon monoxide poisoning – not that anyone ever did. What I did do was nearly die of laughing as I lay under that bone dry space rocket that hot waterless afternoon when I was covered from head to foot in soap and shampoo. I was there, waiting and laughing, for over an hour before the water came back on.

Then there were the cats. Seemingly thousands of them. All grey and brown tabbies, all out of the same mother, an heroic old girl called ‘Little Cat’. Little Cat was one of the most loving feline mothers I have ever known. She was also very proud. Wherever you went in the Stop, Little Cat would follow you with her vast tribe of kittens hot on her heels. You had kittens in reception, kittens in the toilet, the washroom, in your bedroom and, very often, actually in your bed too. Some of the Stop’s more nervous guests would be disgusted and describe the kittens (admittedly full of fleas) as ‘disease vectors.’ But me and mine are cat people and so we just took the cats and their fleas, in our stride. They were all part of a charm that also always included a welcome that was so warm that turning up at the Stop felt like coming home. But then the owners were extraordinary people. Hoteliers and, almost to a man and woman, students too. As they worked in the crazy bedrooms and scary toilets, they studied university texts on biochemistry, physics, English and history.

In the years that I patronised the Stop I met many strange and remarkable people. These included American converts to Islam setting out on the haj to Mecca, whacked out backpackers on the road to they didn’t have a clue where, drug casualties from the 1960s, refugees from Afghanistan, appalled Western Puritans and some very charming men who were probably gangsters. However the thing that lingers most for me about the long-gone Stop, is the view I got from its shabby, probably very dangerous roof one very early morning in the summer of 1989. The sun, though hazy, was up and from the roof I could see the whole of the old city of İstanbul coming to life around me. No whizzy wazzy modern trams in those days, just the sound of the odd ancient car or bus sputtering into life and the cries of the street sellers of simit (bread rolls) and yoghurt. I remember looking out towards the great Mosque of Sultanahmet and then beyond to the Sea of Marmara and watching the seagulls veer away from the smoke that puffed out of the smokestacks of the early morning ferries. OK, I was young then, but at that moment I felt as if I could do anything and be anyone I wanted to be in my crazy, friendly, maddening and fabulous city. It is a feeling I have sadly, never been able to experience anywhere, since.

The life in and around the Stop and its denizens was just so intense that maybe that just isn’t possible. Those days have gone.

‘Why are you standing at the foot of my bed holding a sledgehammer?’ he asked. It was a fair question considering not an hour before we’d been eating squid and drinking cold Leo on the veranda together. What had bought me to this point of madness? To the accompaniment of concert harps played by lithe middle-aged women in knitted cardigans I flashed back two weeks hence to a day when the sky was still azure and the bougainvilleas were bleating forth their gaudy colours. The email rose majestically on the screen like a second sunrise.

‘I represent a major newspaper with a readership of 11.2 billion and I’d like to drive down to Pak Nam Lang Suan to do a feature on you.’

‘Man, these Nigerians,’ I thought. ‘They stop at nothing. Not satisfied with robbing desperate widows of their life savings, now they claim to be journalists. ‘Mbagwe,’ I wrote back, ‘I’m not falling for that one, son. Go take a running jump off a tall giraffe.’ But, after several security checks which included me speaking to the journalist’s mother in New York, it turned out Mgamwe was legit.

‘So, do I come down or not?’ he asked.

‘You paying for the petrol?’

‘Jesus! I could always do John Burdett, you know?’

‘Okay. Don’t get shirty. Yeah, you can come.’

‘Gee, thanks.’

We haven’t got a spare room so I booked him and his personal assistant into the Salt Water View Short Term Beachfront motel just down the coast. I’d never actually seen anyone stay there overnight but you never know if a tour bus is going to break down out front on the very night you’ve got VIP guests. It occurred to me that if all this wasn’t a scam, it was a pretty cool thing so I started to phone around.

‘This big newspaper’s doing a feature on me, with photos. Using my actual name.’

I called all my friends and living relatives, then a couple of dead ones. One call was to Bobby Bristol. Now, Bobby’s a nice chap but it’s rumoured they based Mel Gibson’s role in Conspiracy Theory on Bobby’s actual life.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Why what?’

‘Why you?’

‘I guess they want to know about my books and understand the man behind the stories.’

‘Oh, come on, CC. Be real. No offense intended here but do you honestly think a serious newspaper’s gonna be interested in your dumb books?’

He’d said, “No offense intended,” but that did little to alleviate the offensiveness.

‘Yes?’

‘CC, CC, sometimes I can’t believe how naïve you can be. They’re not interested in you as a writer. They’ve got other agendas. They’ve got something deeper in mind.’

‘I haven’t got anything deeper.’

‘I know that and you know that, but that’s not gonna stop them. Oh no. These investigative journalists, they’ll find it even if it isn’t there. They’ll dig up dirt on you and plaster it all over the front page. Bye bye reputation. Nobody’ll ever buy one of your books again. Dead.’

I had a week to let all this ferment. There were omens. It rained every day. Two of the dogs got diarrhea. My favourite hibiscus died. Then they arrived in a big black car like the politburo. They were friendly and funny like serial killers. They asked a lot of questions like the IRS. They didn’t complain about the Salt Water short term like people who knew they wouldn’t have to fill in the guest register. Like people who could be in and out with nobody knowing who they really were. He matched me drink for drink and those sinister questions just kept popping out of him. By the seventh beer I knew Bobby Bristol was right. I couldn’t possibly let these people go home.

And so we come to him asking me why I was standing at the foot of his bed holding a sledgehammer. Luckily, it was then that I snapped out of my paranoia. He’s just doing his job. It’s been a slow news week. Let him live.

‘Cockroach,’ I said and proceeded to smash the floor tiles to buggery.

‘Big one?’ he asked. (Another damned question)

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘But they’re tough little sods.’

‘Well, gee. Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome.’

I bade him sweet dreams and returned to my room and thought, ‘Whew. That was a near thing’. Before everybody in the world started saying it, my Auntie Rene used to tell me that if something seemed too good to be true, it probably was. Except Auntie Rene had a trick ending. Her version went, If something seems too good to be true, it probably is…unless it isn’t.

I want to write about sex and about death. Since writing was invented it is hard to think of a writer who didn’t embrace these two states of the human condition. They jockey throughout life like two racecars fighting for pole position, and we go along for the ride, strapped into the passenger’s seat of both cars, pretending that we are at the wheel. We avoid thinking that sooner or later we are going to crash both cars. Our brains program us to believe that we are Formula A professional drivers. That individually our skill shapes, alters and controls our destiny. It’s a simple delusion that sitting in the back is the same as being at the wheel but it does pull us through the day (and night).

That’s the reality of life. Your two cars are going over the cliff and into the void. Sex is the one that usually stalls out and sputters to a stop first. Old age sputters, too, and sometimes needs a little push before gravity takes over. And if you look in the rearview mirror, you’ll see a long line of cars right on your bumper about to follow you into the void.

Why the gloom, Moore? What Celtic genes are switching through your synapses that sends a chemical bath through your neuron system and comes out the other end as the ritual of a shotgun marriage between sex and death and a James Dean finality to all of it?

Sir Frank Kermode

It started with Sir Frank Kermode died on Wednesday in Cambridge at the age of 90. He’d written over 50 books. He’d been knighted. He was a Shakespeare scholar, too. Sir Frank wasn’t a relative, a mentor, a friend or even someone I’d recognize passing him on the street. His drive over the cliff of life has been noted in the literary blogs, that faint cluster of stars in the far reaches of the visible Net universe.

Sir Frank with 90 innings at the plate and 50 home runs is inducted into the Pantheon of those few who are nominated by the living as having accomplished a good life, left behind a body of work with his name attached, and contributed to our knowledge and understanding about literature. I think of Sir Frank as someone who represented the high road, what we call ‘high culture.’ He is scheduled to go from life to myth and legend. That apparently is the best we can hope for when the nose of our car points due south and into the void.

So far I suspect a number of readers have been skimming this article impatiently wanting to know when do we get to Sex. That’s the leveler, the Pantheon of beings that gets our engines going. Either you do it, read or watch others doing it, talk about doing it, buy medicine that promises doing-it performance, shop for doing-it accessories, think or day dream about doing it, or have dreams in which you definitely out distancing Robocop in the doing-it department.

Shigeo Tokuda

This brings me back to Sir Frank. We don’t think about old people having sex. Dying, yes. That’s what they’re supposed to do, get out of the way, make way for the young horny ones in our midst. Let’s take a short drive down the low road. Our driver is Shigeo Tokuda, who started his porno film career at 60-years old, and fifteen years later, hitting the 75-year mark, has 200 films under his belt (so to speak). Mr. Tokuda (no knighthood on the horizontal bamboo mat in his future) claims no need to swallow a Viagra before the cameras roll. His position (he assumes many in his films) is that getting and maintaining an impressive erection is purely psychological. Most of Mr. Tokuda’s co-stars are females who are around 30-years old. There is a whole genre of porno films labeled ‘elderporn’ where the age difference between the elderly male and his counterpart is best measured in light years. There is also a sub-genre of elderly women having sex with young men but apparently the market for such films is thin.

When Shigeo Tokuda follows Sir Frank over that cliff for his final take, he may not be remembered for his insights into Shakespeare but for his starring roles in such classics as Tit-Lover Old Man Kameichi and His Horny Pranks.

High road or low road, like blue pill or red pill. You have a choice in the road you take. Authors make that choice every time they start a book. Writing blends death and sex into myth, folktale, legend and serving up a strong brew turns us into addicts. We drink down to the last dregs such stories and ask for a refill. The reality is Sir Frank’s opus makes believe that lives devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom are the pinnacle of human existence and shows our true potential for opening our minds. But our dirty little secret is that we’d trade places playing Shigeo Tokuda’s understudy in our old age rather than parsing the meaning of Hamlet into a book-sized essay. In our heart of hearts, something tells us that while we can never aspire to the likes of Sir Frank, we have a fighting chance to follow Shigeo Tokuda’s example to the final moment when the lights are cut and the stage goes dark.

I could leave Sir Frank and Shigeo at this point. But that would do both of them a disservice. There is something not quite right in the mash up of two very different lives that should stop us from snickering into our hand. This is where SLIM comes into the picture.

The SLIM, which is short-hand for Small, Limited and Impermanent, describes the outer ring dimensions of a single human life. It doesn’t matter whether you’re aiming to be Sir Frank or Mr. Shigeo, SLIM is what all of us are stuck with, including you. We have a sense in a celebrity driven world that some lives appear to be inflated, expanded beyond the normal, and indeed in a real sense these lives give the impression of a SLIM violation.

But there can be no such violation. The human condition is the same for everyone. No one is an exception—no one is immune to SLIM as it is the fundamental rule of defines our existence.

There is another point about the high and low roads. The guardrails and yellow line down the center are come from morality, laws and ethics. We are taught from an early age to follow these rules of the road. But we love our outlaws and our porno stories nonetheless.

The best writers sculpture stories populated with characters who promise to have found a trap door and chance of escape from SLIM. In reality fiction, such a conceit usually is the characters undoing. In fantasy and science fiction, the elements are bent, twisted, and the way out is something that looks vaguely like the human condition but is post-SLIM, like the promise of post-human singularity life. The digital world promises a kind of abstract immortality that is impossible in our analog biology. In the digital universe you are converted into a kind of ‘fingerprint’ in a book where we keep track of whose existences are worthy of remembrance.

Books and films and music—the arts—offer readers a chance to transcend their human condition, sweep aside the SLIM, and substitute a human condition that is much larger, borderless and permanent. The journey to find such alternatives is our tragedy. Noir is the world where the characters never will stand a chance at such transcendence, a world where all the guardrails and center lines are an illusion, the headlights are switched off, and the character drive blind. In the noir world, at each step, the reader understands the utter futility of fighting SLIM. Shigeo Tokuda will one day need to pop a Viagra, and later on the day will come when even Viagra won’t do the trick. Laughter will rain down from the rest of us when that happens, as we secretly believe that unlike Shigeo we will be spared this humiliation as our young co-star lights a cigarette, wraps the sheet around her and winks into the camera.

50 books, 90-years old is an accomplishment; make no mistake about that. Sir Frank gave us our best shot at blowing a hole through SLIM. Bigger caliber rounds have bounced off the shell of SLIM before, and bigger rounds will be loaded and fired in the future. Why do we continue to believe the impossible can be achieved in a single life?

Because so much of life is in working out the daily stuff of existence, Sir Frank working over a draft of a book, Shigeo driving to the studio, brushing teeth, eating, checking email, taking a phone call, reading a newspaper, gossiping with a friend, helping out someone in the family or a neighbor. It doesn’t add up to much. It lacks weight and importance. It is so incredibly impermanent. We crave a life that tips the scales as having been heavy and strong and long.

As writers we undertake the tasks of finding the location of such weight and meaning among the rubble of day-to-day existence and attached these dispatches which makes life grander, more exciting, and purposeful. Unless you write noir which puts your nose into SLIM and asks you as the reader to keep on breathing.

Like bends in the road, a story—noir or otherwise—demarks a path, and characters need a good reason to go down that path, equipped with the skills to negotiate the twists and turns, and dealing with the troubles along the way. The destination is, as they say, not the reason to travel; it is the journey and what happens along the way that defines us.

Writing of the disdain expressed for genre novels by critics, Raymond Chandler said that there were just as many bad “literary novels” of the type favored by critics as there were bad genre stories – except that the bad literary novels didn’t get published. In other words, there’s nothing inherent in so-called genre fiction that makes it lesser than “literary” fiction.

Chandler knew what he was talking about. His great noir novels, such as “The Big Sleep” and “The Long Goodbye,” are must-reads for anyone who wants to know how to build a sentence and a voice, how to create an image that won’t fade a few pages on, how to make people want to read it all over again. His contemporaries in the “literary” field who were more favored by the highbrow critics of his time are these days consigned to the dustbin of college literature courses. (If you don’t believe me, tell me when was the last time you reached for a volume by Upton Sinclair or Pearl Buck?)

But historical fiction is back. Ever since “The Name of the Rose” (published in English in 1983), the genre has accrued greater legitimacy. Last year’s Booker Prize went to a historical novel (“Wolf Hall”) and this year’s looks likely to go to “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” (do an internet search for its author David Mitchell and “genius,” and you’ll see why.)

Even poor old Alexandre Dumas and the swashbuckler have been returned from their long-ago burial under a mound of critical invective. In the last decade or so, Dumas has found his way into the title of a novel by Arturo Perez-Reverte, one of the most notable historical novelists of our time. Perez-Reverte can buckle a swash in the form of his Dumas-derived Captain Alatriste series, but he also has enough modern perversity for one of his novels to have been adapted for the screen by Roman Polanski. (That novel, “The Club Dumas,” even included a reference to Eco, “the professor from Bologna,” in a nod to his role in legitimizing the genre.)

Crime readers who want something with a bit of a cosmopolitan, intellectual slant often go for the World War II-period mysteries of Alan Furst. There have been other successful evocations of old Vienna in the books of J. Sydney Jones, and likewise for New York with Caleb Carr. My blogmate Barbara Nadel alternates between contemporary Turkey and historical London to great effect.

Each of these books, in their way, does what historical fiction alone can do. They take contemporary issues, place them in a historical context and thus let us see them anew. One of the best novels of the last two decades was Barry Unsworth’s heartbreaking evocation of the slave trade in “Sacred Hunger.” You’ll never see race and class the same way once you’ve read that book.

That’s partially why I’ve turned to historical fiction for the books I’m working on right now. Earlier this year my fourth Palestinian crime novel came out. Before I return to my West Bank sleuth Omar Yussef, I’m going historical.

My New York editor is working on MOZART’S LAST ARIA now. It’ll be out in the UK in late winter, in the US in early fall. I’m writing a novel now about the last years of Caravaggio’s life. Both take a real historical mystery as their starting point. But I also think they’ll tell us a great deal about what it is to live the life of an artist, and more than that they’ll focus on the nature of love. That’s something that isn’t limited to any historical period.

I did actually do my blog for this week before this one. But now I think that this should replace it and that next week should be reserved for a rather joyful piece about İstanbul.

I’m not looking for sympathy. I just think that people should know just how quickly the abyss of depression can open up sometimes. I was OK on Friday, looking forward to a weekend of no editing. Now it’s Sunday and I feel so worthless I can’t find a cupboard dark enough in which to hide. Something has triggered this off but now it’s going it has taken on a momentum all of its own.

Of course I know with my psychology grad head on that all this is about underlying fears and horrors that can be triggered off at the drop of a hat. But as a civilian, I still feel bewildered, appalled and amazed by how my family can even be in the same house with me. Not that I’m in the ranging around stage. I’m at the hiding, weeping place and I think that everything I have ever done is shit, a mistake and a cause for punishment.

I would like to get drunk or just shove a load of substances into myself and crawl under the table and try not to breathe. But I can’t. If I drink, it’ll never end and no one can have that, least of all me. It feels indulgent to be so weak and so full of self-loathing and all of that makes me hate myself more. Depression is a thief that takes everything you have and then comes back in the middle of the night and nicks your sleep. I hate it. At the moment I don’t hate is as much as I hate myself, that just isn’t possible. But I will hate it fanatically eventually, and then I will begin to feel something other than whatever this is.

I will be OK. I just had to confess.

I was at my lowest ebb. The book I thought I was writing suddenly started to write me and I had no control over it. I was suicidal. All those Shakespeare impersonators had it right. They used a quill. If the writing didn’t work out you just span it round and impaled yourself on it. But how do you even begin to kill yourself with a keyboard? I tried smashing myself over the head with it but all I got was a headache and ‘qwerty’ engraved down my forehead. Where would my next idea come from? Where could I go for inspiration? And, as always, the answer was, Laos.

The Director General of the Ministry of Information and Culture’s Publishing Department, who shall remain nameless because it’s got more letters in it than Paris Hilton’s mail box, gave an inspirational talk on the occasion of Lao Printing Day. I usually send a card but this year I’ve been a little tangled up with a bloody book that wouldn’t let me write it. The director general should know how to get us stuck writers over the hump because he’s written over fifty poems some of which became songs. (I imagine any poem could become a song if you sang it.) His key points were;

1. “Reading is one of the many ways in which we can improve our knowledge, but books containing useless information are a waste of readers’ time.”

There you go. Right off the bat he got the nib square in the solar plexus. The DG was talking about me. He was killing me softly with his song which had originally been a poem. I wasn’t writing anything to improve anyone’s knowledge. I WAS MAKING IT UP. Nobody could trust me. I wrote it down. ‘write knowledge.’

2. “In addition, they (writers) should be clear on their own standpoint and national policy when they write a book.”

Oh my word. Got me again. Where was my standpoint? I tell you, it was in the ideology toilet. MAKE ENOUGH MONEY FROM THIS BOOK TO PAY FOR DOG FOOD. I didn’t have a point, either erect or reclining. And I hadn’t even considered my national policy. I wasn’t even sure where my nation was. I wrote, ‘write to conservative party.’

3. “One way to support the Party’s strategy on national development and economic policy is to write more human interest pieces, especially profiles of successful businesspeople, which would act as an example for others to follow.”

Exactly. Where has my head been all this time? The public doesn’t want to read about losers. People who spend all their time reading novels are already losers. THEY WANT TO READ ABOUT STINKING RICH PEOPLE. It’s just like all those country people addicted to TV soaps about hi-so philanderers in Bangkok. I wrote, ‘forget everything the Lao communist Party used to believe in. It’s so passé.’

4. “A good book should make readers laugh or cry while they are reading it.”

There you have it in a nutshell. It’s the readers who are supposed to be crying. Not me. The only time I ever got sobs out of my readers was when they reached the end of a book and referred back to the price they’d paid for it. I discovered that in 1968, the DG had written a book entitled, It’s Very Easy to Learn the Lao Language. And I bet you generations of readers have been laughing and crying through it ever since. But DG’s point here is quite simple. Don’t take it personally. IT’S THE STORY THEY’RE LAUGHING AT, NOT THE AUTHOR. I wrote, ‘Stick in a few jokes.’

I thought I had all the inspiration I needed, but the greatest uplift to my saggy self-esteem goolies was yet to come. And it arrived, not from the Ministry of Information and Culture, but from the Ministry of Education. Somebody had decided that Lao university graduates compared unfavourably with those from neighbouring countries. So, what did they do? THEY CANCELLED UNIVERSITY ENTRANCE. Really. All the kids who’d forked out for a corsage for this year will have to put it back in the freezer cause they all have to do another year of high school. That’ll teach ‘em. And, you know? It taught me the best lesson of all.

IF IT DOESN’T GO RIGHT – START ALL OVER AGAIN.

If you’re on the flight from Bangkok to Surat around now and you look down and see a rather large bonfire, fear not. That’s just my first draft. Kop jai, Lao.