"Graham Joyce, so brilliant as always. It's frustrating that such a fine writer seems consistently unable to break out to the larger mainstream. He'd easily fit alongside, say, Michael Chabon, but I think he's better."

"”As for the opium, I’d seen how good it was, how damnably selfishly good. I liked it. It was all about me and nobody else. It was about my insignificant little cry, my pathetic bleat against the uproar of life, and my little bleat, so it seemed to me, was as important as hers or anyone else’s. I could see how luxurious it was to sink into a magnificent selfishness like that, one which had no bottom, and through which you could go on falling and falling and falling. You could be asked to undertake the rewiring of hell and it would seem like nice work.��

If you knew Danny Innes, you would think nothing was wrong with his life. He goes to work, fixing the electrical problems he is asked to fix. He shows up every week to play team Trivial Pursuit. It looks like everything about his life is as Jim Dandy as it was two weeks ago or six months ago or three years ago.

What you might not know is that he is estranged from his wife. You might not know that his son has given himself over to fundamentalist Christianity, and his daughter has become a drug addict. Danny couldn’t decide which was a bigger failure, the Christianity or the drugs. The one thing he doesn’t really put together is that both his kids are trying to escape their lives. They are just using different methods.

”I’ve been a selfish child pretending to be a man. I allowed fatherhood to become a creeping cataract, preventing me from seeing the changing needs of those around me. But I didn’t know then what I know now. That you have to let them pluck from your heart with bruising fingers great, sparkling, golden resinous chunks of love, and never ask under what moon they smoke it or where they spill it.��

Sounds painful, doesn’t it? When you first meet Danny, he will not be this philosophical or wise about his relationship with his kids. Those realizations come after the painful, spiritual journey of self-discovery he is about to depart upon. He might have left to find a child, but he just might find himself.

If you had told Danny that he was going to be in a hut in Thailand, well maybe Thailand (when you get that deep in the jungle, borders become blurred, smoking one opium pipe after another, making deals with a posh speaking drug dealer who is a jokester one minute and a homicidal maniac the next, and trying to discover what he truly believes about what it means to be alive), he would have told you that you had fallen off your cracker.

It all begins with a call from his wife telling him that Charlotte, Charlie, has been arrested on drug charges in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Danny, needless to say, is not that impressed with the expensive Oxford education he paid for. She was a sweet child before he sent her among those drugged out, body piercing, tattooing, whoring, hoards of Oxfordians not worth the space they occupy in this world.

We won’t talk about the jealousy. Let’s let Danny figure that out on his own.

Danny enlists the aid of his son Phil to go to Thailand with him. He doesn’t know if he can stand to spend that much time with him without bludgeoning him to death with his own Bible. Phil, knowing this, strategically brings only a hand sized Bible that might sting when Danny slaps him about the face with it, but it won’t crush his skull. Danny’s friend Mick volunteers to come with him, which if weighed on a scale of helpfulness might tilt towards hinderance.

Armed with books by Thomas De Quincey, Rimbaud, Yeats, and Coleridge, all consumers of vast quantities of opium, Danny heads to Thailand. I have to laugh about his reading selections. I’m not surprised when he discovers that the books are mostly just a lot of fucking, nonsensical poetry. Well, he does garner some insights from the Opium Eater, which is in itself annoying because he doesn’t even EAT THE OPIUM.

Anyway, moving on.

There are some wonderful passages about the strange, wild beauty of the jungles of Thailand. ”The vegetation became a thick, dry and scrubby tangle fighting for growth between spindly grey tree trunks of astonishing height, canopy upon canopy. The trees were festooned with parched, creeping vines, sometimes so defoliated that the vines looked like trailing masses of electrical cable. Unlike the trees at home, there were no low branches, and where the tree did sprout it was with large papery leaves of greens, russets and reds. The dusty path ahead was sprinkled with huge, crinkly desiccated leaves. The ground breathed back at us, dry and hot.��

The money line, of course, is that last sentence. That is where I feel the weight of a backpack, the cloying heat, the cry of some strange bird from the trees above, and a dryness in my throat that only cold, clear water could cut. I’m not just reading about Thailand anymore...I am there.

So I reach the end of this novel and find myself staring in the mirror at the boiled out eyes, gaunt features, and emaciated form of Danny Innes and realize that I’m looking at myself. I can’t find Nabao, who is supposed to be handing me my next pipe. I’m terrorized by cosmic thoughts. I look over my shoulder and see Joseph Conrad, a moon beamed, living, breathing, block print, at the tiller guiding my life through the weeds of a narrowing river. It is hard to see that there is any peace achieved with higher understanding. My nerves are strung tighter than Appalachian banjo strings. My brain is slipping gears like a 1957 Chevy, leaking oil, sputtering, held together with rusted wire and duct tape.

I’d talk to you about the spirits, but I think I finally shook them. Walk softly and carry a big spirit stick, I always say.

Thank goodness this is fiction. People always say to me fiction isn’t real. Fiction isn’t REAL! Fiction ISN’T REAL! FICTION ISN’T REAL!

Until it is.

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