These are travellers tales with a difference. The settings are the streets, markets, hostels and guest houses, bars and nightclubs in the congested, enervating cities of Calcutta, Taipei and Saigon and the places in between. The characters that inhabit these places are restless souls travelling through the backwaters and backstreets of Asia without a forward ticket or a particular destination. Their attitude is ambivalent and their humour black. Each of the stories describes one of their adventures. The collection of stories are linked by the journeys of Sean Dinan, a disillusioned journalist.
Sean’s journeys and thus the stories are roughly in three parts. The first third is on his wanderings as he decides what to do next and include travels through India, Nepal, Thailand and Hong Kong. Sean farewells his Irish lover in Calcutta, he has a bar conversation about the peccadilloes of mosquitoes in Darjeeling and hears Croatian Vin’s bizarre scheme to find a wife at Kowloon’s infamous Chung King mansions.
The second part is centered on the characters he meets at Taipei Hostel. Almost on a hunch Sean travels to Taipei and discovers a city which seems as fantastic as it is alien. He camps at the Taipei Hostel which is “at the end of a dirty alley next to a public crematorium” while he plots his departure from the bizarre hostel and the grungey city. Soon however he is seduced by the lifestyle of a western vagabond. His friends are college dropouts, drug dealers, bar owners, karaoke hostesses, general’s daughters, Triad thugs, failed actors, road diggers, and others who are simply looking for a place to stay awhile and earn some money so they can continue on their travels. Like Little Stevie who “…had left the dole queues of England to join the wanderers of Asia…one of those who got a little older every year but never any wiser, every day knowing that it was another day that made it more difficult to return home.”
Sean and his companions live for the present. The stories describe their wholesale addictions, intimate affairs, dangerous pursuits and occasionally their unwitting falls into love. There are episodes of hilarious inanity like Ted’s rejection of a Finnair hostess with a liking for Phil Collins and Hamish McTaggart’s brawl with a bus driver over safety advice. There is passion and deceit. Midnight dinners with Safira, Angel’s unwitting seduction and Miranda’s past lives.
The third and final part describes the final destinations for these restless souls. For some it is a descent into madness: Gil’s delusions of grandeur and Kent’s ice-fuelled paranoia. For others, it is a spell in purgatory such as Callum’s brush with pain. In the end Sean cannot avoid his own reckoning. His road has been marked by dependence and tragedy. Like all of us, he must come to terms on where he has been and where he hopes to go.
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