Pure
by Timothy Mo
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Timothy Mo's first novel in a decade is set within the battle for secession in the Muslim regions of southern Thailand. Pure covers epic expanses of time and is told through narrators who range from fanatical zealots to decorated Oxbridge dons. Everything that Mo's readers expect abound in this long-awaited novel: versatile style, memorable characters, insight into those tormented by dual loyalties and the ability to handle the weightiest of themes with a light touch. By examining the show more cultural wars of the past and present, Pure's themes are among the most important of the day. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
The first novel to be written by Timothy Mo in over 10 years is set in contemporary Thailand, and the main character is Ahmed, who prefers to be called Snooky, a narcissistic ladyboy (transvestite) from a Muslim family in southern Thailand who does drugs on a regular basis and steals from upscale stores and his her straight male clients to support her decidedly non-Islamic lifestyle in the heart of Bangkok. She and her fellow katoeys are caught by vice squad officers in flagrante delicto during a drug fueled orgy, and Snooky is beaten and imprisoned after she taunts them. In exchange for her release from charges that could send her to prison for decades, she provides the vice squad with valuable information and agrees to work as an show more undercover agent for a local Islamic school that is suspected of carrying out acts of terror.
The novel consists of chapters narrated by the key characters: Snooky; Victor, a pompous Oxbridge professor and former British intelligence agent in Southeast Asia; Shakyh, the Pakistani mastermind of the Islamic school; and Umar, the school's spiritual leader, who secretly despises Shakyh andSnooky Ahmed. Victor's main purpose is to provide a historical backdrop for the rise of Muslim extremism in southeast Asia; Shakyh also serves in that role in addition to planning the group's increasingly more violent acts. Snooky becomes more radicalized, while she hides but doesn't disavow her ladyboy identity or her drug habit, and walks a dangerous tightrope as she provides the police with information about the group, knowing that she will meet a painful death if she is uncovered.
Pure is an interesting novel about the political history of Thailand and the rise of Islamic activity in southeast Asia. However, I found the novel to be overly clever and rather unfocused, one which would have benefitted from an experienced editor, which this book apparently didn't have. It has received rare reviews, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was selected for the upcoming Booker Prize longlist, but I would be disappointed if it did. show less
The novel consists of chapters narrated by the key characters: Snooky; Victor, a pompous Oxbridge professor and former British intelligence agent in Southeast Asia; Shakyh, the Pakistani mastermind of the Islamic school; and Umar, the school's spiritual leader, who secretly despises Shakyh and
Pure is an interesting novel about the political history of Thailand and the rise of Islamic activity in southeast Asia. However, I found the novel to be overly clever and rather unfocused, one which would have benefitted from an experienced editor, which this book apparently didn't have. It has received rare reviews, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was selected for the upcoming Booker Prize longlist, but I would be disappointed if it did. show less
a very clever, innovative idea...twisted but somehow it got plausible... Mo is witty-- had me laugh out loud. I think Mo had the characterizations right...each "felt" different as well as "true."
structurally the book needed to be tightened up and there are times when a point seems drawn out longer. I learned a lot and I enjoyed it.
Mo does a very good post-colonial critique, showing the arrogance and ineptitude of the British.
structurally the book needed to be tightened up and there are times when a point seems drawn out longer. I learned a lot and I enjoyed it.
Mo does a very good post-colonial critique, showing the arrogance and ineptitude of the British.
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ThingScore 83
You should never judge a book by its disclaimer. Readers of Timothy Mo’s startling, typically eccentric Pure may be forgiven for putting it down unread when confronted by its first page: “this fiction is a distillation. About places and personages, dates and dialects, its principals have not always been exigent. None have any but an ideal existence in their own lucubrations.”
It is hard show more to say quite how Pure is a distillation (or a lucubration, for that matter). It certainly does need some sort of disclaimer, though, as it tells the shocking story of how Snooky, a young Thai katoey (a ladyboy, in the cruel vernacular) becomes first a British-run spy, and then a brutally effective jihadist. show less
It is hard show more to say quite how Pure is a distillation (or a lucubration, for that matter). It certainly does need some sort of disclaimer, though, as it tells the shocking story of how Snooky, a young Thai katoey (a ladyboy, in the cruel vernacular) becomes first a British-run spy, and then a brutally effective jihadist. show less
added by kidzdoc
For the last two decades, novelists in the west have suspected that the "necessary subject" (as Nadine Gordimer once described apartheid) is the rise of Islamist terrorism and the spread of Arab nationalism. Most English-writing authors, though, have concluded that they lacked either the background, languages or – after what happened to Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, a novel that show more seems increasingly prophetic – guts to tackle the topic. One exception is John le Carré, whose example Mo is possibly acknowledging by casting Pure in the form of a spy story.
There are certainly echoes of Le Carré characters in Victor, an elderly Oxbridge don whose fictional Brecon College has numbered among its students many future Arab potentates and several spooks, including Victor himself. Surely, though, only Mo could have imagined the figure who alternates most of the novel's narration with Victor: Snooky, a 6ft-tall Thai lady boy and movie critic.
A consistent joy of the book is Mo's voice – or rather, voices. The cascade of multilingual puns and pan-global cultural references nods to the work of Anthony Burgess, although that writer came to the far east as more of an outsider, and there is a frequent sense in Pure that Mo is setting down sentences that only he has the linguistic and cultural knowledge to write. show less
There are certainly echoes of Le Carré characters in Victor, an elderly Oxbridge don whose fictional Brecon College has numbered among its students many future Arab potentates and several spooks, including Victor himself. Surely, though, only Mo could have imagined the figure who alternates most of the novel's narration with Victor: Snooky, a 6ft-tall Thai lady boy and movie critic.
A consistent joy of the book is Mo's voice – or rather, voices. The cascade of multilingual puns and pan-global cultural references nods to the work of Anthony Burgess, although that writer came to the far east as more of an outsider, and there is a frequent sense in Pure that Mo is setting down sentences that only he has the linguistic and cultural knowledge to write. show less
added by kidzdoc
Just past the halfway mark in Timothy Mo's seventh novel, his heroine – a strapping Bangkok ladyboy who has joined a company of bloodthirsty Islamist warriors – wanders through a serene orchard on an island close to Singapore. Snooky's jihadi platoon (sanook = fun in Thai) has halted for a brief rest en route to help the insurgent Moros of the Philippines as fellow holy warriors. She (and show more for all the unwanted testosterone that jungle warfare brings, Snooky's chosen pronoun never wavers) samples the fruit of the ebony tree. It is not dark and dense like the wood, but pale, delicate and enigmatic: "tart and sweet in the same mouthful, soft but crunchy... If marzipan dormice grew on trees... they would taste like this". If this moment smacks of Eden, and forbidden fruit, it also helps initiate Snooky into the mysteries of the jihadi pursuit, where darkness yields to light, stark contradictions resolve themselves, and chaste perfection grows from the crooked timber of humanity.
For any major novelist to write the modern jihad from inside takes balls (which this heroine, in every sense, never lacks). But to make our first-person guide to the lofty idealism and flint-hearted cruelty that fuse in the zealots' mission a street-smart, razor-tongued Thai katoey calls on a degree of chutzpah that limits the field to just about one. Mo brings all his audacity and exuberance – frivolity, even – to one of the grimmest topics in our cultural lexicon. If Chris Morris's holy-war burlesque in Four Lions comes to mind, so do the baroque battlefield tragi-comedies of a Heller or a Waugh. show less
For any major novelist to write the modern jihad from inside takes balls (which this heroine, in every sense, never lacks). But to make our first-person guide to the lofty idealism and flint-hearted cruelty that fuse in the zealots' mission a street-smart, razor-tongued Thai katoey calls on a degree of chutzpah that limits the field to just about one. Mo brings all his audacity and exuberance – frivolity, even – to one of the grimmest topics in our cultural lexicon. If Chris Morris's holy-war burlesque in Four Lions comes to mind, so do the baroque battlefield tragi-comedies of a Heller or a Waugh. show less
added by kidzdoc
Author Information
7 Works 1,277 Members
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 2012-04-12
- Important places
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Dedication
- B.H.H
Let him come hither - First words
- Call me a Believer with a Blackberry, the Mohammedan with the Mac.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)imshinyimpure.
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- 23
- Popularity
- 1,143,398
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.88)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 1
