Cargo Fever Hits the States
Friday October 19, 2007
For all of you readers in the States, I thought that I should let you know that it is now possible to get hold of a copy of my novel Cargo Fever from Amazon.com.
Cargo Fever explores the Indonesian myths of the orang pendek – the so-called “Short Man”, said to live in the forests of Sumatra, and tackles important themes such as religion, the persistence of cultural memory, rationalism and yeti-smuggling, whilst exploring the twilight world of the boundaries between Homo sapiens, Gods, ancestors and animals. But rather than rattling on about it here, which would be unseemly, perhaps I should just give an extract from the book – an extract specially selected for visitors to thinkBuddha. The extract comes from chapter 13, when we meet Mr Liao, a Taiwanese fisherman who works for the Buddhist fishing company, Matsya Corporation, and who is negotiating a delicate contract with the local authorities on the island of Kenukecil.
An hour or so later, Mr Liao the Taiwanese fisherman appeared on the jetty at the back of the Lovely Vista Hotel. He performed a few stretches, facing into the sun, then sat down on a low stool and crossed his legs. He closed his eyes, feeling the cool breeze on his face. A fly buzzed past his ear. The lap of the waves against the jetty soothed his heart. Ah, he thought, the sufferings of cyclical existence! His head was thumping just a little and the pain in his side that he had first noticed a month or two ago had returned that morning. Mr Tan, his assistant, was dozing like an ox upstairs.
Fugitive images flitted across his mind: fragments of conversation, memories, hopes, desires. He made another subtle adjustment to his posture, trying to settle his body so that his mind might follow suit. It had been a long time since Mr Liao had experienced the delicious fruits of meditation. How hard it was, he thought, to be a man both of the world and also of the spiritual realm. He should have become a monk: it was the good fortune of monks that they lived off the fortunes of others and had no work of their own, other than that of treading the noble path with its eight incomparable limbs. Like an octopus, he thought. As a fisherman, the imagery came naturally to him and did not seem strange. Like an incomparable octopus.
Once, Mr Liao had seriously considered taking monastic vows, but the itching of the flesh had been too hard to resist. He had dreams, sometimes, of himself in saffron, in a cloud of incense, serene and untroubled. The most persistent of his dreams was this: he was dressed as a monk and walking in quiet meditation when he was set upon by women, who cavorted around him naked. In this dream, Mr Liao walked through their midst like a bull elephant in the Himalayan forest walking through a herd of elephant cows, for these mere women were incapable of disturbing the meditative equipoise of his mind. The dream ended with him sitting before a shrine and the women abruptly disappearing, leaving him alone with a ribbon of incense smoke snaking up to the ceiling.
Outside his dreams, however, the fleshly itching was too strong and Mr Liao had taken a wife, having read in a primer on religion that the life of a virtuous householder was better than that of a bad monk. Not long after his marriage, he realized that even this life was beyond his moral grasp. Although it pained him to confess it, he had often partaken of the pleasures offered by Mr Gu’s establishment in Kenukecil. Thus, Mr Liao was a man of contradictions: capable of subjugating the itching of his flesh in his dreams, but not in his waking hours; a model husband and a perfect father to his son while at home in Taipei, who drank deep of the pleasures of the whorehouse when he was away…
If you want to read more, then you can Buy a Copy from Amazon.com (it will take a few weeks to arrive, but worth the wait: you’re not likely to read a better book about yeti-smuggling all year). UK visitors can buy a copy here
