Saint Jack, by Paul Theroux

SJ-PT

SJ-PT


Saint Jack, Paul Theroux – I read one of Theroux’s recent train books, Eastern Star something, and found it crotchety and misinformed. But this book I have long wanted to read for a few reasons – it is one of the few novels to be set in Singapore, where it is notorious, as is Theroux himself. Theroux also lived here for many years in the early seventies, so chances were high that it would be less misinformed (his chapter on Singapore in Ghost Train To The Eastern Star seemed also to be the less misinformed chapter of that book as well.

Saint Jack is a peculiar book, as it’s all about the character development of our handsome young pimp/saint, recounting various anecdotes in this man’s life that reveal something about his character. He is 53 when we catch up to him in Singapore after 13 years of living there, and slowly we piece together how he came to be in Singapore. Through his colourful descriptions of Jack’s pimping, we get the sense that Theroux spent a lot of his time in Singapore doing research for the book itself. There is no plot to the book, despite what my Penguin classic says on the back about “the faintly sinister American Edwin Shuck” engaging him to set up some blackmail on a US Army general. That only occupies the final 20 pages of the book, and really isn’t any more indicative of anything in it than any random selection of 20 pages throughout the rest of the book would be. We hear Jack explain Singapore, we see him explore Singapore, we see him drink with his friends in a pub, we see him open his own pub, run afoul of the local gangs, we see him deal with “the new fella” at his company, his local employers, the ships, the girls, the gangs, and the police.

Good fun, with some bad jokes thrown in. Love it! Now I want to see the movie – that was directed by Peter Bogdanovich, but banned for many years in Singapore because of some controversy swirling around it.

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