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Pure 
by Timothy Mo 
Turnaround Books 
Some writers like taking risks. One of them is Timothy Mo, whose new novel is about transvestism, Islamic terrorism, murder, drugs, espionage, Aids and Hollywood films. The story is narrated in turns by a Thai katoey or ladyboy, an Oxford don who is also an Anglican priest, and a Pakistani fundamentalist leader. 
Pure confronts some of the most intractable and frightening problems of today's world. It is also one of the funniest novels you will read this year.
Mo is Anglo-Chinese. His first three novels were about Hong Kong people and his next three were set in Southeast Asia. If we can claim Mo as a Hong Kong writer, or even a regional one, we can congratulate ourselves for being associated with one of the most inventive, and bravest of writers in English today.
If we think of him as a British writer, he is one who makes many other British novelists seem insipid.
It has been more than a decade since his last novel, Renegade or Halo 2, and longer still since a falling out with the British publishing industry caused him to go solo and self-publish under the imprint of Paddleless Press. This new novel is published by Turnaround. 
Witty, gossipy, and vain, Snooky is the most attractive of narrators. Through her words, Mo manages to convey with great affection the life that she shares with her katoey friends in a glittering and mostly tolerant Bangkok. 'I wanted to be Miss World,' she says, 'and I found myself serving a life sentence in a male body.'
Even though haunted by the ladyboy's two constant companions, Su (suicide) and Ana (anorexia), Snooky has a good life, with steady work as a film critic, plenty of friends, and more than a fair share of pleasures - until she is ensnared by a very long tentacle, stretching from an Oxford college.
Victor is a spymaster, a recruiter of agents. He is also a professor of history, and the vehicle for some of the novel's musings on the history of Southeast Asia, focused on the Muslim insurgencies in southern Thailand and the Philippines. 
He is linked to the same forces of globalisation that produced Snooky's Bangkok lifestyle, her knowledge of world cinema, and her brilliant command of English.
What kind of world is being created in this corner of the globe, after colonialism, Vietnam, 9/11, and the rise of China?
Victor and his political masters and allies want information about the mujahideen in southern Thailand, and Snooky, whose cousin is one of them, is recruited, with some violence, to join them and report back regularly to Victor. 
She joins a group led by the charismatic Shaykh, and shares their life in training camp and on a number of increasingly murderous missions, first in Thailand, then in Mindanao. They decide to join forces with a group of Philippine Moro insurgents for a while, and then go back to Thailand. 
Snooky now has - though not by choice - two father figures, Victor and Shaykh. To be loyal to one would mean to betray the other. For Snooky, whose identity is, more than most, a created thing, this predicament is also a decision about who she really is. It is resolved, in an explosive climax, at the end of the story when Snooky, Shaykh and Victor meet face to face for the first and last time.
Mo is a thoroughly unpredictable writer. But he is also immediately recognisable, as his prose is full of turns and conceits and allusions that couldn't be written by anyone else. In Snooky's narration, we get a fully rounded character, full of personality. She is postmodern and cosmopolitan. Some of the funniest moments in the book derive from the way she contrasts with Shaykh's band of brothers. 
With her long fingernails and an obscene tattoo in a compromising location, she makes a most unlikely jihadist. But she makes herself useful. Using her media experience, she makes a propaganda action film for the brothers (it's an homage to The Seven Samurai), and then a series of reality TV shows. These include Big Brotherhood House and Blind Hate, both of which prove popular in the jungle camps: 'Yah, once again from global entertainment to global jihad. Snooky personally put the fun into fundamentalism.'
Mo has fun with Snooky's part of the story. But he is equally deft at capturing the idiom of his other two storytellers, the urbane but melancholy Victor and the single-minded - yet tragic - Shaykh. It's this contrast between Shaykh's world and Snooky's that best explains the book's title, and its pure white cover. 
Shaykh's life is dedicated to a religious idea of purity that he wants to see enshrined in the theocratic caliphate. That is his primary political aim. He desperately wants the world to be clean. Snooky's life is gloriously impure, with its transvestism, its promiscuity, its materialism and rude humour.
Shaykh disapproves of literature, believing it is wrong to enter into the lives of other, imaginary people in stories and take their experiences. But it is ironically Mo's ability to imagine the world as Shaykh sees it that prevents us from dismissing his views out of hand.
 As the growing closeness between Shaykh and Snooky seems to hint, it's not enough to say that fun is always a preferable thing to fundamentalism. We have to try to understand both of them.




Story of transsexuals, spies and insurgents is pure fun