Yin Yang Tattoo by Ron McMillan Sandstone Press HK$104
Western stereotypes of Asia are slippery things. In his debut novel Yin Yang Tattoo, Ron McMillan repeatedly slips and slides across the line separating worn cliches from ironic commentary on those worn cliches, and usually just about manages to stay on the right side of it.
Near-bankrupt Alec Brodie, a Scottish photographer - much like the author - is summoned to Seoul, where he used to live, to undertake a lucrative job for K-N Group, a major Korean corporation. There he runs into an old adversary - now working for the corporation - and an old lover. When he smells something fishy in the assignment, he finds himself falsely accused of a crime, realises that his and others' lives are in danger - and soon sees his whole world start to unravel.
McMillan handles this Chaebols Behaving Badly yarn with some gusto. The plot cracks along at a fair pace and is all-too believable, if maybe not quite so twisty-turny as it could have been. But this is a coherent and well-told page-turner. It's unpredictable, but still unfolds with a sickening inevitability, a classic tale of a protagonist who gets into a situation beyond his control, partly because of his recklessness but mainly because he happens to have become the pawn of powerful and ruthless people.
However, the fact that this is written by a Westerner about a Westerner in Asia is the 800-pound gorilla sitting stolidly in the background of the entire enterprise. McMillan attempts to steer a course between cultural sensitivity and the awareness of cultural difference that forms one of the backbones of the novel - for the book to work, Korea has to be exotic and unknowable, but McMillan is enough of a modern creature to realise the dangers of romanticisation and cliched orientalist exoticism. But his awareness of this problem can in itself make the book clunk along sometimes, heavy with awareness of its own potential to offend and desperate not to do so.
Of course, with a Western protagonist, he's treading a delicate path from the outset. The equally engaging Bangkok series by English author John Burdett, for example, handles this more successfully by using a half-Thai, half-Western lead character to open Westerners' eyes, often hilariously, to their own cultural weirdness.