Berlinski the Rain King

Mischa Berlinski’s novel “Fieldwork” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pages, $24) is a hybrid that’s complex enough to make any horticulturalist proud. Part family saga, part murder mystery, the literary graft doesn’t merely sprout, it shoots up like spring hibiscus in Bangkok. Unfortunately, its coupling of a chatty, almost jaunty sensibility with a dark tale of demons and spirits causes the bloom to fade before the book is quite over.The narrator, a ungrounded sometime journalist (named, in a remarkable coincidence, Mischa Berlinski) has followed his girlfriend to northern Thailand, where she’s landed a teaching job. In Chiang Mai, Mischa sees the sights, dines out, writes the occasional puff piece for magazines, puffs the occasional opium pipe, and meets colorful characters. In a seductive, Maugham-like opening scene, one of these figures — the young Josh O’Connor (“taught English … took a few photos now and again for Agence France-Presse …” and played trumpet in “a Thai ska band called the King’s Men”) — tells Mischa the intriguing but truncated story of a once glamorous anthropologist named Martiya van der Leun who has recently committed suicide in the Thai prison where she was serving a 50-year sentence for murdering, as we soon learn, a Christian missionary named David Walker.Seeing the possibility for a feature story, Mischa energetically tries to flesh out the few facts he’s been given, phoning and flying around the world with an ease that casts doubts on his occasional protestations of poverty. For a while, it’s great fun to follow this amiable, bright young man in his fieldwork as he talks to ex-boyfriends, former professors, and fellow students of van der Leun, and befriends a goodly portion of a mighty evangelical family, the Walkers. This powerful clan has over the past century made their way from Oklahoma to China to Burma and, finally, to Thailand in order to accomplish their singular mission of converting the Dyalo, a (fictional) peripatetic Sino-Thai hill tribe whose spiritual world is peopled by numberless malign spirits to whom they are enthralled or enslaved, depending on your point of view.And point of view is what this novel is about. Martiya, the anthropologist, as we see in numerous flashbacks, struggles to see through the eyes of the reticent Dyalo. The Walkers do, too, but with a different goal. The journalist Mischa is trying to see things from everyone’s point of view. After his discovery that Christian missionaries are just as exotic as Dyalo shamans, he does a pretty credible job of it. But deferring to the other’s point of view, while admirable in an anthropologist or a journalist, can in a novelist sometimes signal an avoidance of finding one’s own.Mr. Berlinski writes in an urbane spirit that treats fundamentalist Christian evangelicals with respect, even admiration — and that is cause for rejoicing. But as in his depiction of the animist Dyalo, something vital is missing. Intelligence and verve go a long way, but they do not make up for a lack of gravity in the face of grave subject matter. Mr. Berlinski’s noncommittal, slightly amused narrative voice is pitched just right for describing a Grateful Dead tour or sketching pompous academics. But when he tries to descend into the shipwreck of a real family or probe the danger of the sacred, it keeps bobbing to the surface. The bland rays of enlightened secular humanism have trouble penetrating these depths.Even with the last-minute help of the “opium man,” nocturnal fertility rites, demon possession, and murder, the sunny sensibility that rules the novel’s first 300 pages can’t be exorcised, and the denouement falls flat.In a couple of short afterwards, the author tells rather too much about the genesis of his novel. But his admission that he initially tried to write a nonfiction book about a real Thai hill tribe is illuminating. More often than the numinous tale it sometimes aspires to be, “Fieldwork” reads like a very good three-part New Yorker article. And that’s not a bad thing.Mr. Solomita last wrote for these pages on Milan Kundera.

Berlinski the Rain King

Berlinski the Rain King

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