The Glass Kingdom by Lawrence Osborne (Hogarth)

Bangkok is where people come from all over the world to reinvent themselves so it’s no wonder that this is the city where Sarah Mullins chooses to launch herself as Sarah Talbot Jennings. She’s arrived with a suitcase full of cash that she received for letters between famous people--ones that she forged herself. She needs a place to hide until the resulting furor dies down and Bangkok, she decides, is a “chaotic, lawless choice.”

She settles into one of the city’s newly gentrified neighborhoods, one characterized by the “affable stability” of “yoga studios and espresso bars.” Presiding over this veneer of hipster chic is The Kingdom, a somewhat down-at-the-heel residential complex consisting of four towers, each twenty-one stories high. It’s the perfect place for Sarah to park her money for a while while she figures out her next move. What she hadn’t counted on was that she’s landed in a community of drifters and grifters who have come from all over the world, looking for their next target, be it another city or another sucker. 

Sarah, with her aura of wealth and her claims of being a “trust fund baby,” is the perfect victim. The women who befriend her are ones who are experts in decodng the nuances of social class and this American newcomer lacks the manners and style of the upper echelons. It’s an easy matter to figure out where her money comes from. All her neighbors have to do is persuade Sarah to hire the same maid whom they recommend and all use. There are no secrets that a Bangkok maid can’t uncover and this one quickly finds the suitcase laden with bundles of cash.

Suddenly things begin to unravel with alarming speed. Political demonstrations spring up all over Bangkok, threatening to unsettle the capitol and launch a revolution. A curfew goes into effect and power outages throw much of the city into darkness. During a black-out, one of Sarah’s neighbors shows up, covered in blood. She has just killed her physically abusive boyfriend. Sarah, steeped in the female solidarity that infects every American woman, becomes an accomplice, and as she does, reality begins to dissolve.

Many foreigners in Bangkok lead liquid lives. They have no rights and they have no roots. Without much language or cultural understanding, they float in a strange netherworld where paranoia coexists with cluelessness. Sarah, “a living ghost,” unanchored by any previous form of reality, finds herself in a place where nothing seems real and ghosts are a common feature. Spirit houses, shrines, trees that are protected by presiding spirits, a young girl who appears and disappears in odd places and at odd intervals, the woman whom Sarah assists in the aftermath of the murder who vanishes as thoroughly as if she too had been killed, the spectral flowers that gleam pale in the darkness of the nocturnal power failures--all of these things conspire to evoke an atmosphere of dread. 

Atmosphere is what Lawrence Osborne is known for and he’s become a master of it. In The Glass Kingdom, he anchors this with a skimpy plot, undeveloped characters, and a shaky command of dialogue and presents it as all surrealism. However atmosphere is almost enough to carry the book--don’t read it at night, alone. Without ever creating a tangible threat, the gothic darkness of a lonely existence and a cloud of invisible menace is almost overwhelming. 

The problem with inventing a new life is it’s as easy to erase as it is to change. Disappeared, has she? Who cares? Osborne, perhaps without knowing it, has written a cautionary fairy tale with a concluding moral that’s as plausible as it is horrifying.~Janet Brown