The Washington Post
Monday, March 12,
Tom Knox’s international thriller “The Lost Goddess” is based on some interesting ideas. Scientists messing around surgically with people’s brains to alter their behavior is nothing new in popular fiction, but Knox makes the plausible case that macabre experiments by the Soviets to manufacture conscienceless fighters and docile atheists had their origins in Stone Age frontal lobotomies.
In his too-long, overheated, sometimes unintentionally funny tale, he links this cruel Russian craziness with French leftists helping the Khmer Rouge turn the enslaved Cambodian people into more willing automatons, as well as with Chinese attempts to do the same thing before the communist regime discovered that surgical thought control could be replaced by consumerism.
Knox’s galumphing jalopy of a plot has his not-very-believable hero, a travel photographer named Jake, getting chased around East Asia by bad cops and an assortment of sadistic killers while in the company of a Cambodian beauty named Chemda Tek. She works for the U.N. agency involved in prosecuting Khmer Rouge murders, and she yearns to learn what happened to dead and missing family members.
Eventually, these two hook up with Julia Kerrigan, a young American archaeologist who has found a connection between the skulls in remote French caves and the skulls on the Plain of Jars in Laos that also seem to have had holes drilled into the frontal lobes.
Just as Chemda is haunted by Cambodia's grotesque past, Julia has her own ghosts to contend with, mainly a gang rape when she was a teenager. Always predictable in a grisly way, Knox places Julia in a room with an orangutan that’s been trained by a mad Russian to mate with humans.
To say that Knox’s prose is breathless is to insult lungs. Here is a typical paragraph: “A Valium let [Julia] sleep on the plane to Moscow, a Xanax let her sleep on the plane from Moscow to Bangkok. She needed energy for this confrontation: she was spiraling into the black hole of the truth, where destruction and oblivion lurked, where the killer herself might be headed — but the risk felt good, she was unmoored now, floating on the tidal bore, surfing her success to the mouth of the river. Gloriously free.”
With writing like that for a plane trip, you can imagine what the sex scenes are like. It doesn’t take long for Jake to make a move on Chemda, who in bed is like “dark raw sugar. She reminded him of dark, sweet, fierce unprocessed sugar.”
Edibles are good in Chemda’s case, but Knox is relentless in using the local cuisine to suggest menace. Southeast Asia — Thailand especially — is a region with some of the tastiest, zestiest, most healthful food in the world, but Knox’s focus is exclusively on rat carcasses in Laotian markets, duck-fetus lunches in Tibet, a Cambodian witch who gnaws on tarantulas, and bar girls in Bangkok snacking on “fried cockroaches.” (Surely he means crickets.) We’re meant to view Jake as some kind of worldly fellow, but his take on East Asian food sounds like Aunt Elva who’s just off the plane from Topeka, Kan.
Though too easily spooked by Asian local color, and not the wordsmith one would hope for on matters this serious, Knox is careful to get his history right. (Read John le Carré’s “The Honourable Schoolboy” for a masterful rendering of 20th-century Laos and Cambodia.) It doesn’t hurt to be reminded of the horrors perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to ’79 and particularly the way in which the United States supported the Pol Pot lunatics for years afterward simply because it was the Vietnamese who finally overthrew them.
Knox’s is an ugly picture of the U.S. role in East Asia’s history, and there’s no denying any of it, including the feeble attempts to make amends. Chemda’s grandfather tells Jake that by the time of Pol Pot’s fall, “my daughter and her husband had already escaped to America, where they had baby Chemda. They were safe. The paradox is quite piquant: first America tried to kill us, then it saved us. Ah . . . America with her bipolar moods, so generous and so unhinged.”
Unhinged foreign policy, unhinged pop novel — there’s a symmetry here.
bookworld@washpost.com
Lipez writes the Don Strachey private-eye novels under the name Richard Stevenson. “The 38 Million Dollar Smile” is set in Thailand.
THE LOST GODDESS
By Tom Knox
Viking. 448 pp. $26.95
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