Book: Pure
Apr. 16th, 2013 11:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Timothy Mo
Details: (c) Timothy Mo 2012; Pub Turnaround Books 2012; ISBN 978-1-873-26279-5
Verdict: Pure is a powerful and disturbing book.
Reasons for reading it: I generally appreciate Mo as a writer, and I was quite excited to see a new book of his after a long hiatus.
How it came into my hands: Library.
When people ask me what I've been reading, I've been replying that Pure is the story of a Thai ladyboy who ends up in an Islamic fundamentalist terror cell. It's very good, there's a lot of different stuff in it, good characterization, good examination of several complex issues that don't get much attention in most UK media, and an exciting and pacy story. It's also a completely repulsive book; I expect a degree of violence from Mo, but Pure makes it really relentless, terrorist violence, gender violence, torture, colonialist and military violence. In many ways I think Pure is a parody of the kind of thriller where upper-class English spymasters play a "Great Game" of sending agents to exotic locations and arranging assassinations and torture at arms' length and manipulating political factions to foment expedient violence. It undermines the genre because the viewpoint character is one of the expendable brown people actually experiencing the direct effects of Britain trying to extend its colonial influence.
Snooky is a very cool character, feisty, irreverent and also utterly terrified at being caught up in all the plotty stuff which in a lesser book might be just there to give the reader an adrenalin rush. There are occasional chapters from other viewpoints, some of the slightly higher up Jihadists and the spymaster Victor Veridian. These are utterly horrible and not glamourized at all, you get a really strong impression of narrow-minded religious fundamentalists obsessed with violence, and the unbelievably entitled posh guy who thinks he can decide politics in the Far East by entirely fastidiously giving orders for people to be tortured or blown up. At the same time, you do get a glimpse of what motivates these people, they have some sympathetic features and are much more than just caricatured villains.
Pure is offensive in pretty much every way it's possible to be offensive, because most of the characters have views that are eg racist and antisemitic and colonialist and extremely sexist and homophobic. Because it's all first person, there's no overt moralizing commentary on this, the reader is left to draw their own conclusions. Snooky liberally uses homophobic and transphobic terms to refer to herself and her ladyboy [sic] friends.
Overall I admired Pure more than I enjoyed it. It starts out darkly humorous but by the end, by the time you really care about the characters it's just dark. It's too subtle to be a polemic about colonialism is bad / religious fundamentalism is bad, but it really strongly shows some of the things that are awful about these political tendencies and how they're intertwined.
Details: (c) Timothy Mo 2012; Pub Turnaround Books 2012; ISBN 978-1-873-26279-5
Verdict: Pure is a powerful and disturbing book.
Reasons for reading it: I generally appreciate Mo as a writer, and I was quite excited to see a new book of his after a long hiatus.
How it came into my hands: Library.
When people ask me what I've been reading, I've been replying that Pure is the story of a Thai ladyboy who ends up in an Islamic fundamentalist terror cell. It's very good, there's a lot of different stuff in it, good characterization, good examination of several complex issues that don't get much attention in most UK media, and an exciting and pacy story. It's also a completely repulsive book; I expect a degree of violence from Mo, but Pure makes it really relentless, terrorist violence, gender violence, torture, colonialist and military violence. In many ways I think Pure is a parody of the kind of thriller where upper-class English spymasters play a "Great Game" of sending agents to exotic locations and arranging assassinations and torture at arms' length and manipulating political factions to foment expedient violence. It undermines the genre because the viewpoint character is one of the expendable brown people actually experiencing the direct effects of Britain trying to extend its colonial influence.
Snooky is a very cool character, feisty, irreverent and also utterly terrified at being caught up in all the plotty stuff which in a lesser book might be just there to give the reader an adrenalin rush. There are occasional chapters from other viewpoints, some of the slightly higher up Jihadists and the spymaster Victor Veridian. These are utterly horrible and not glamourized at all, you get a really strong impression of narrow-minded religious fundamentalists obsessed with violence, and the unbelievably entitled posh guy who thinks he can decide politics in the Far East by entirely fastidiously giving orders for people to be tortured or blown up. At the same time, you do get a glimpse of what motivates these people, they have some sympathetic features and are much more than just caricatured villains.
Pure is offensive in pretty much every way it's possible to be offensive, because most of the characters have views that are eg racist and antisemitic and colonialist and extremely sexist and homophobic. Because it's all first person, there's no overt moralizing commentary on this, the reader is left to draw their own conclusions. Snooky liberally uses homophobic and transphobic terms to refer to herself and her ladyboy [sic] friends.
Overall I admired Pure more than I enjoyed it. It starts out darkly humorous but by the end, by the time you really care about the characters it's just dark. It's too subtle to be a polemic about colonialism is bad / religious fundamentalism is bad, but it really strongly shows some of the things that are awful about these political tendencies and how they're intertwined.
