Off the Rails
There's a freedom living abroad that's difficult to describe. One is not judged the same as you are back home. Locals tend to attribute almost all our behavior - better or worse - as just being something foreigners do. The minor guilts that haunt everyday life are absent and true personalities shine. You begin acting on your own conscious without second thoughts instead of having to consider what other people think. That freedom is exponential in somewhere like Cambodia, an impoverished nation putting itself back together after wholesale slaughter during decades of civil war. There's an allure to the anarchy that draws many colorful characters.
It's also the subject of Amita Gilbao's Off the Rails in Phnom Penh: Into the Dark Heart of Guns, Girls, and Ganja. Unfortunately, it was horrific in every imaginable way. To begin with the writing was sloppy. There was no narrative arch, no story to unfold, and he simply doesn't have a writers hand at description. Three times in one paragraph he described Cambodian music as somber. He invents words - something I'm not opposed to - but sticks with the duds throughout the book. One of the words in his last sentence was "tragicomic." No one says this. Your last sentence is supposed to be poignant, reflective... tragicomic is what you come up with? It's almost as bad as him stopping to add "shopping arcade" in parenthesis to let us know that's his clever term for strip malls.
So we've got down that he's a bad writer... so what does he pick as the subject of his book? Whoring druggie pedophile expats. He delivers almost 200 pages about men running around in Southeast Asia snorting heroin before their English classes and renting teenaged peasant girls sold into sexual bondage.
He throws out his cards early by having someone describe his work as a being " Like a Gonzo rant from Hunter S. Thompson" on the cover but then falls on his face emulating the unedited stream of consciousness style that only a select few can pull off. There's also little tension between the writer and over-the-deep-end friends like Thompson had with Oscar Acosta. Thompson uses his lawyer almost as a proving point of his own sanity and keeps Acosta at a safe distance when he's is at his worse, you really get a feeling that Gilbao deeply admires the men he writes about. He wishes he could be brave enough to sleep with a $2 illiterate 14 year old prostitute too.
It's so disappointing because the subject matter is so rich. Gilbao brings up the Josef Conrad link early saying that there's a reason Kurtz goes crazy in Cambodia in Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Copalla's re-imagining of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Heart of Darkness is about a good man gone mad without any of the routine social factors keeping us sane. Deep in the jungle, far removed from civilization, morals and ethics bend beyond recognition. Gilbao makes the connection in the first chapter, but then does nothing more with it.
This would have been an excellent approach to the book instead of the self-important diary entries. Gilbao touches on it briefly, when he visits a brothel and leaves before anything happens, afraid that there was no turning back afterwards. It is precisely that moment, when heavy moral questions about actions disappear after trial, that is worth writing an entire book on. The depravity in and of itself is not interesting. It's the mental slide into an entirely different world where the values and norms you grow up with vanish without notice that holds literary weight.
Tags:Off the Rails Phnom Penh Cambodia Amit Gilboa Gonzo Thompson Hunter S. travel writing expat lifestyle Asia Treyopia
