It’s 1976 in the People’s Democratic Republic of Lao. Enter Dr Siri Paiboun: Septuagenarian super-sleuth and self-taught pathologist, pursued by a host of unruly denizens of the spirit world.
Dr Siri, we learn, joined the Communist Party “for a lark” in the 1930s while he was a medical student in Paris. He has spent the past 35 years “reassembling broken soldiers” in the jungles of his war-ravaged homeland. But now the Pathet Lao has overturned the country’s pro-United States government and he has come back to Vientiane, hoping for a quiet retirement.
Happily for all of us, he doesn’t get it. Instead, he reluctantly becomes Lao’s chief coroner. Actually, Lao’s only coroner. It’s one of those honours from the Party you can’t refuse. And suddenly Dr Siri is no longer healing the living, but unravelling the mysteries of the dead.
Somewhere along the way he discovers that his own connection with the afterlife is stronger than he suspected. It turns out that he is channelling the spirit of a 1000-year-old shaman called Yeh Ming. Nothing much to worry about there, you might think. Except there is: Yeh Ming has incurred the wrath of the “phibob” (a bunch of malevolent underworld thugs) and they’re screaming for revenge.
Confused? Spare a thought for Dr Siri.
Luckily, he’s not alone. Back at the morgue there’s Nurse Dtui and Mr Geung to help him out when things get complicated. Nurse Dtui is no ethereal Apsara: she’s smart, solid and sassy. Geung — dismissed by most people as being mentally retarded — is lion-hearted and loyal. And he can cut through ribs “as if they were chalk with his long-Âhandled cutters”.
Then there’s Civilai — Dr Siri’s old jungle comrade, now a member of the politburo. When life and the revolution get tough, the two “undiplomatic old coots who were too stubborn to play the political game by the rules” get sozzled on rice whisky on the banks of the Mekong and exchange repartee that spits like firecrackers.
There’s also Madame Daeng — the Nigella Lawson of Vientiane’s noodle stalls, who has secretly loved Siri since they were both dodging American bombs in the jungle. And there’s a colourful cast of extras: Auntie Bpoo, the transvestite fortune-teller; Comrade Noo, a renegade Thai forest monk; assorted Vietnamese “advisers”; and — of course — Siri’s boss, the horrid Judge Haeng. Ambitious and petty, he is the acne-prone face of the new elite.
The world of Dr Siri, let me confess right now, is as seductive and piquant as a bowl of Madame Daeng’s noodles. One bite and you’re hooked.
You don’t even have to know South East Asia to appreciate Colin Cotterill’s version of 1970s Lao. For Southern African readers — especially those who remember Zimbabwe in the early 1980s — there are unexpected resonances. Like the description of Lao’s post-revolution telephone system: “As the Lao said, passing a live turtle up one nostril and down the other was easier than trying to make a local telephone call beyond the city.”
There’s also the incident in Curse of the Pogo Stick during which an aged party apparatchik literally drops dead from boredom at a political meeting, after one too many keynote speeches. And there’s the classic scene in Anarchy and Old Dogs when Sri and Civilai watch a Bruce Lee movie that has been dubbed into Lao and given a healthy dose of Marxist-Leninism in the process: “‘You are a usurper of agronomic labour,’ said Bruce. ‘I shall teach you a lesson.'”
But it’s not all rollicking hilarity. Cotterill’s plots are an ever-changing cat’s cradle of transitions and collisions: the spirit world dances with the mortal, and a Huntley & Palmer biscuit tin houses a shaman’s divining paraphernalia.
Dr Siri, himself, moves between many different worlds. He is addicted to crusty baguettes and admires the novels of Georges Simenon — though one suspects he’d choose Inspector Morse rather than Maigret as a drinking partner. At heart, though, he is a patriot who hates bullies and loves his country — shambolic though it may be — for its innate kindness.
Cotterill, like his hero, is on the side of the misfits and the marginals — those who manage to steer their way through a cruel world with their humanity intact. Indeed, journeys are a recurrent theme in all six of the Siri novels. In Disco for the Departed, Mr Geung embarks on an epic 300km walk through minefields and malaria-ridden swamps to get back to his “family” at the morgue. In Curse of the Pogo Stick Hmong villagers (abandoned by their former American allies) dismantle their homes and their history before setting off for a new life in Thailand, leaving their house spirits to mope “in the beams and rafters like spoiled children … Like the Hmong they protected, they had nowhere to go.”
Inevitably, Cotterill (a former teacher who now lives in a fishing village on the Gulf of Siam) is often mentioned in the same breath as Alexander McCall Smith. It’s probably a good marketing ploy, but the comparison doesn’t do Cotterill any favours. Cotterill’s prose may be deceptively simple, but it never veers into sentimentality, and his characters — however surreal — are complex and surprising.
Since Dr Siri’s debut in 2004, he’s been popping back with a fresh adventure every year. Aficionados will be relieved to know that a seventh book is due this August. But the title, Love Songs from a Shallow Grave, may cause your amulets to vibrate.
Is Lao’s chief coroner about to embark on his final journey?