Comrade Aeon’s Field Guide to Bangkok
Emma Larkin
Granta: 2021
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Comrade Aeon, the namesake of Emma Larkin’s riveting and luminous debut novel, is a former Communist Party of Thailand cadre displaced in Bangkok. After losing his job as a history teacher for daring to tell the truth about state violence, he spends his days cataloguing the city and its inhabitants in notebook after notebook. He fled to the jungle after the massacre on the morning of 6 October 1976, when state and para-state forces assaulted, lynched and murdered leftist students at Thammasat University, at the height of the Cold War. In a pattern of obfuscation, the junta announced that forty-six people were killed in the massacre, even though witnesses placed the number much higher. In 2009, the year the novel takes place, and still today in 2021, forty-five years after the massacre, survivors and activists continue to struggle to uncover the truth of what happened and hold perpetrators to account.

The overwhelming atmosphere of Comrade Aeon’s Field Guide to Bangkok is the unease and uncertainty created by ongoing impunity for state violence and its twin, inequality. Thailand is one of the world’s most unequal countries, and nowhere is inequality sharper than in Bangkok. A small number of ultra-rich Thais and expatriates dine in restaurants where the cost of one meal exceeds the monthly income of many of the construction workers, motorcycle taxi drivers, factory workers, food vendors and others who make up the bulk of the population. Overcrowded slums abut glitzy condos, hotels, shopping malls and the latest innovation of capitalism: mixed-use megaprojects that combine all three into one luxury tower.

• Tags: Emma Larkin, Issue 25, Thailand, Tyrell Haberkorn