(Drivebycuriosity) - Lawrence Osborne belongs to my favorite authors. I love his novels "Hunters in the Dark" (my review) and "The Glass Kingdom" ( review) and I also enjoyed his book "Bangkok Days ( review). I just finished his "The Ballad of a Small Player" ( amazon). Again a pleasure to read.
The novel is written in first person. The narrator, an aging Englishman who calls himself "Lord Doyle", came to a lot of money and went to Macau to spend his fresh fortune for gambling in the casino palaces. Like in "Hunters" & "Glass Kingdom" the leading character is a drifter without an aim and certainly not shy of risks which leads to a chain of events (this is a spoiler free blog)
I do not like the leading character - not many will - because he is a pathetic gambler & drinker and behaves parasitic, masochistic and totally immorally. But his tale - as ridiculous & surreal as it seems - fascinated me anyway and kept me on the edge. I wanted to know how long this could go on. And I indulged into Osborne`s descriptions of the splendid casinos, hotels & restaurants, the atmosphere there and the often weirdly acting Chinese & Western players: "The rooms seemed underwater, the smoke static like fish milk suspended in water that isn`t floating".
The English author, who lives in Bangkok, depicts wonderfully the tropical climate & live in South Eastern Asia and the huge variety of local food & drinks which the narrator almost continuously is swallowing up. The novel is of course spiced with the mathematics & probabilities of games of luck blended with Asian superstition, including the gambler´s fallacy which ignores mathematical laws and "involves an assertion of negative correlation between trials of the random process".
Osborne added another milestone to the tradition of Dostoevsky, Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming and many others who enjoyed gambling and wrote about the addiction to it (rubyfortune ).
No comments:
Post a Comment