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The Day of the Tiger reviewed by Paul Dorsey for The Nation, Bangkok, 15 February 2015.
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A prowl in the human jungle
A tiger among Thailand’s expatriate writers, William Peskett dazzles with an eclectic array of short stories that unhook every emotion
In the story that gives its name to this latest collection from Pattaya-based writer William Peskett, all seems quite in order for several pages as characters converse and survey – through “big picture windows” – their locale on the edge of the beaten-back jungle. The reader wonders if “The Day of the Tiger” will produce an actual tiger, perhaps gazing menacingly from the thicket surroundings these buildings.
Then something odd happens. Van, a livestock farmer, is having a drink with Jak, owner of the restaurant he supplies with meat. The diners are busy with their steaks and chops and ribs – and the waiters are replenishing their water bowls. Moments later, Van touches his bowl to Jak’s “and they lapped a hearty draft”.
Yes, as soon becomes alarmingly clear, the well-mannered, convivial, eloquent players in this scene are tigers – fangs and claws and stripes and all. Yes, the steaks and chops and ribs come from humans. And yet, no, we never once lose empathy for the fur-covered protagonists.
In the course of 18 pages, nostalgic comfort winnowed from the past yields in turn to surprise, amusement and then the shock of the future. Of course science fiction has often turned the tables on man in his dealings with “the lower orders”, but never with the haunting intent and stone-cold rationale that Peskett brings to the predicament.
There are 11 stories in this fourth collection from Peskett and, as usual, most are set in Thailand. Not all work as well as the title story – some endings are mystifying, and maybe that’s deliberate. But, thanks to clever turns in the telling and to the measured tones of his prose, balancing the evocative against the reassuringly neutral, none can be called a disappointment.
While most of the tales are sombre and often deeply thought-provoking, there is humour as well. The hero of “The Taxi Driver” loses a lucrative fare because he can’t very well ignore the human hand he spots poking out of a pile of rambutan on sale at the side of the road. The hand turns out to be attached to an elderly man, though his shorts and shoes have come unattached. The whimsical yarn of attachments and detachments is told with stoically restrained mirth – and considerable poignancy.
In the opening piece, “Airside”, a poor, lonely woman living beneath the roars of arriving and departing airliners develops a yen to become detached from the earth’s surface and finally manages to save enough money for a flight. She never makes it past the passengers’ lounge, though, for well-grounded reasons of her own that come as a delightful surprise.
“Guile and Gullibility” has various third wheels circling watchfully around unhappy relationships, testing the barriers of love and trust. “Market Day” is a marvellous sketchpad of characters passing before the author’s eyes, each a potential subject for another day’s writing. “Wired” is an antic chapter from the private eye’s files involving a wealthy businessman playing at being a worried father.
In “Planter’s Punch”, the whole weight of colonialism comes down on the head of a tea-grower in Mae Hong Son when a reporter from a Western magazine arrives to do a laudatory feature on him but her photographer focuses instead on the minions in his employ. Meanwhile the visitors’ driver is shunted off for the night to the servant’s abode, where surely he’ll be “happier”.
And, for all of us who daydream about eventually shucking our bonds and responsibilities and getting off on our own someplace far away, “The Sea Isle of Itsara” offers a glimpse of what it might look like. Also glimpsed are the built-in drawbacks of wishful thinking.
Meantime, while your nerves are still on edge, “A Minor Proposal” finds a man past middle age left alone on the planet with an adolescent girl. A mysterious catastrophe has removed all other creatures but left everything else intact. Our omega-alpha Adam and Eve have all they need – except the sexual compatibility required to restart the human race. Young Eve (Emma, actually) will find a way, whether he and his daily diary like it or not.
Peskett, educated in Belfast and at Cambridge University, worked in various trades and since retiring has lent his hand to an even wider range of writing, from essays and novels to a radio play (check out his lively website, www.WilliamPeskett.com). He was also a columnist for a Pattaya newspaper, the results compiled in “If You Can’t Stand the Fun, Stay Out of the Go-Go”, but has thankfully left the painted ladies behind for “The Day of the Tiger”.
He is a published poet too, and it shows.
In the end, we all must change or be lost. In “Riparian”, which completes the collection, a young man nicknamed Noo becomes a young woman – almost.
“Noo is growing up. It is a joyous time. Like the fattening of a pig or the blush of a ripening mango, it’s a time to observe the way things change, how nature places one foot in front of the other without consultation and the jungle and the village – the whole world possibly – matures into what it is supposed to become.”
In the story that gives its name to this latest collection from Pattaya-based writer William Peskett, all seems quite in order for several pages as characters converse and survey – through “big picture windows” – their locale on the edge of the beaten-back jungle. The reader wonders if “The Day of the Tiger” will produce an actual tiger, perhaps gazing menacingly from the thicket surroundings these buildings.
Then something odd happens. Van, a livestock farmer, is having a drink with Jak, owner of the restaurant he supplies with meat. The diners are busy with their steaks and chops and ribs – and the waiters are replenishing their water bowls. Moments later, Van touches his bowl to Jak’s “and they lapped a hearty draft”.
Yes, as soon becomes alarmingly clear, the well-mannered, convivial, eloquent players in this scene are tigers – fangs and claws and stripes and all. Yes, the steaks and chops and ribs come from humans. And yet, no, we never once lose empathy for the fur-covered protagonists.
In the course of 18 pages, nostalgic comfort winnowed from the past yields in turn to surprise, amusement and then the shock of the future. Of course science fiction has often turned the tables on man in his dealings with “the lower orders”, but never with the haunting intent and stone-cold rationale that Peskett brings to the predicament.
There are 11 stories in this fourth collection from Peskett and, as usual, most are set in Thailand. Not all work as well as the title story – some endings are mystifying, and maybe that’s deliberate. But, thanks to clever turns in the telling and to the measured tones of his prose, balancing the evocative against the reassuringly neutral, none can be called a disappointment.
While most of the tales are sombre and often deeply thought-provoking, there is humour as well. The hero of “The Taxi Driver” loses a lucrative fare because he can’t very well ignore the human hand he spots poking out of a pile of rambutan on sale at the side of the road. The hand turns out to be attached to an elderly man, though his shorts and shoes have come unattached. The whimsical yarn of attachments and detachments is told with stoically restrained mirth – and considerable poignancy.
In the opening piece, “Airside”, a poor, lonely woman living beneath the roars of arriving and departing airliners develops a yen to become detached from the earth’s surface and finally manages to save enough money for a flight. She never makes it past the passengers’ lounge, though, for well-grounded reasons of her own that come as a delightful surprise.
“Guile and Gullibility” has various third wheels circling watchfully around unhappy relationships, testing the barriers of love and trust. “Market Day” is a marvellous sketchpad of characters passing before the author’s eyes, each a potential subject for another day’s writing. “Wired” is an antic chapter from the private eye’s files involving a wealthy businessman playing at being a worried father.
In “Planter’s Punch”, the whole weight of colonialism comes down on the head of a tea-grower in Mae Hong Son when a reporter from a Western magazine arrives to do a laudatory feature on him but her photographer focuses instead on the minions in his employ. Meanwhile the visitors’ driver is shunted off for the night to the servant’s abode, where surely he’ll be “happier”.
And, for all of us who daydream about eventually shucking our bonds and responsibilities and getting off on our own someplace far away, “The Sea Isle of Itsara” offers a glimpse of what it might look like. Also glimpsed are the built-in drawbacks of wishful thinking.
Meantime, while your nerves are still on edge, “A Minor Proposal” finds a man past middle age left alone on the planet with an adolescent girl. A mysterious catastrophe has removed all other creatures but left everything else intact. Our omega-alpha Adam and Eve have all they need – except the sexual compatibility required to restart the human race. Young Eve (Emma, actually) will find a way, whether he and his daily diary like it or not.
Peskett, educated in Belfast and at Cambridge University, worked in various trades and since retiring has lent his hand to an even wider range of writing, from essays and novels to a radio play (check out his lively website, www.WilliamPeskett.com). He was also a columnist for a Pattaya newspaper, the results compiled in “If You Can’t Stand the Fun, Stay Out of the Go-Go”, but has thankfully left the painted ladies behind for “The Day of the Tiger”.
He is a published poet too, and it shows.
In the end, we all must change or be lost. In “Riparian”, which completes the collection, a young man nicknamed Noo becomes a young woman – almost.
“Noo is growing up. It is a joyous time. Like the fattening of a pig or the blush of a ripening mango, it’s a time to observe the way things change, how nature places one foot in front of the other without consultation and the jungle and the village – the whole world possibly – matures into what it is supposed to become.”