Smoking Poppy by Graham Joyce

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Smoking Poppy by Graham Joyce
pub: Gollancz. 279 page enlarged paperback. Price: Ł 6.99 (UK). ISBN: 0-575-07304-7

check out website: www.orionbooks.co.uk

The premise of this book is quite simple. The narrator Danny receives word that his precious daughter, his most beloved child, is being held in a prison in Thailand for drug smuggling offences.

Already in a terrible state as a result of his recent split from his wife, this news seems to trigger an instant downwards spiral for the character as Danny commits to travelling to Thailand in order to find out what exactly has happened to his progeny.

Smoking Poppy by Graham Joyce Despite these easy beginnings, the book turns out to be a wonder of narrative complexity and contains some of the finest uses of language that I have had the privilege to read in the last few years.

Graham Joyce may be known to some of you for his earlier works such as ‘The Tooth Fairy’ and ‘Dark Sister’ which are books of a fantastical persuasion. More recently though Joyce has been writing novels which can't be pinned down so easily such as ‘The Stormwatcher’. ‘Smoking Poppy’ continues this refreshing trend as Joyce shows he has no intention of allowing his audience to dictate the content of his novels.

Although the blurb on the back of the book does hint elusively at the presence of 'spirits', please do not expect a doorway into Narnia to appear at the top of the mountain, as it most assuredly does not.

The book begins by placing us in the familiar environment of south-east England but the action is quickly moved from here to the city of Chiang Mai in Thailand. Here, Joyce imbues the setting with a wonderful sense of 'otherness' - full of alien beauty.

This sense of venturing into the unknown is far more accomplished and involving than most other authors have achieved. It reads like Conrad's ‘Heart Of Darkness’ should have done, mysterious yet intrinsically human.

We are eased into the setting, as Chiang Mai is full of western influences and comforts. It is Joyce's masterstroke that he provides us with these things to cling to before ripping them away and leaving us deeply embedded in a very frightening and lonely place, far from 'civilisation'.

The characters are extremely well drawn, which is essential in what is a principally a character driven work. Despite this, Joyce does not make it an easy thing to like them. They are real with all the flaws and contradictions that a real person has.

The narrator Danny, in particular, is wonderful as he spaces moments of humorous insight with glimpses of a terribly flawed logic, which reveal to us the fractured nature of this poor soul's psyche.

His companion, Mick, who could easily have just been an excuse for a bit of comic relief, is wonderfully bigoted in a passive way. We are soon treated to a scene in which he sits and shares a cigarette with a Buddhist monk countering our first impressions of him.

The Thai characters carry all of the flavour of their country with them but are never treated as being inferior or less cultured than the westerners. Indeed the jungle people in particular have a way of life that often appears to be far more sensible than ours.

Joyce revels in the rough edges and the undefined borders and, in many ways, the jungle seems to be a metaphor for this, a limitless place where the sky can't be seen and the possibilities are endless.

Even if your tastes do not generally include the more 'mainstream' branches of fiction, I would advise anyone who has ever been lost in a book or lost in themselves, to immediately pick up a copy of this novel.

I guaranty the spirits Joyce conjures will haunt you for a long time to come.

Paul Skevington

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