FICTION: FieldworkBy Mischa Berlinski Atlantic, 317pp, £11.99 - SOMETIMES a chance fragment can stick - it begins to fester and refuses to be quietly forgotten. This is more or less exactly what happens to the narrator of Mischa Berlinski's offbeat debut, a murder mystery quest that may or may not be based on fact and for sheer readability won its place on the shortlist for the US National Book Award.
The narrator is called Mischa, he may or may not be the author, and he tells his story in a conversational, journalistic tone that only occasionally strives somewhat awkwardly for a more heightened literary effect. For most of the journey, and journey it is through the vividly described lush, steamy landscape of Thailand, Mischa proves good company in that he is as bewildered and as intrigued as the reader. Just leave reading the acknowledgments for later.
Berlinski's approach is similar to that of the exciting Spanish writer, Javier Cercas. Not that Berlinski writes anywhere as well as Cercas, but both writers leave the reader aware of the ambivalence created by wondering where and when does fact become fiction and can fiction exist in the midst of so much fact? Is it supposed to? It is a bit puzzling, but then so is this story which offers a vast amount of fascinating information along the way, information that has very little to do with the mystery, but then, somehow, that doesn't really matter. Confused? Good.
So Mischa, who grew up in Manhattan, appears an aimless sort of guy with a great deal of experience of travelling through Thailand. He is a graduate and a useful freelance journalist capable of filing copy on a range of subjects. He is also wonderfully devoid of ambition. When his girlfriend secures a teaching job through the internet, he, having just lost his when the new internet start-up he was working with, fails, heads off with her to Thailand. He has a pal, Josh, already settled there. Josh is no ordinary character; he is larger than life, almost Shakespearean, at least judging from his physical description: ". . . he was neither tall nor short but decidedly round: he was chubby-cheeked, curly-haired, and round-nosed, with bulging eyes and an oversized head. He had thick lips and a gap between his two front teeth which whistled very slightly when he spoke and made his speech nervous and breathy. His body was pear-shaped, with an enormous, protruding posterior: when he walked, he waddled like a duck; and when he laughed, as he did often, his whole body shook."
Just when one might be wondering why Berlinski is investing so much in a physical description, it becomes clear - without Josh there would be no story, no bizarre anecdote to pass on to Mischa, no obsessive quest. Josh tells Mischa about a crazy errand he had to run for a friend who had been asked by a woman in Holland to make contact with her niece. The niece was in jail, in Thailand, and had been left a legacy.
Mischa makes great use of Josh's comic delivery, here is a man well used to having an audience. He recalls the phone calls during which he asked the older woman when her niece was being released from prison. "Long pause on the phone. 'Fifty years', the aunt says. 'So what's your niece doing in prison?' Long pause on the phone. Like she doesn't want to tell me. 'She's a murderer', the woman finally says in a thick Dutch accent." The aunt doesn't even know who her niece happened to kill. Josh's subsequent visit to Martiya in prison also has its moments. At first she suspects he is a missionary who has been sent to see her.
Josh after laughing at the idea, swiftly disabuses her of the notion: "You got it all wrong, sister. I'm here to give you money." Martiya, who had been raised and educated in the US, does not see the money as a way of buying her freedom. Most of it is to be given to a charity helping hill tribes as she says "I can't leave now. . . And where would I go?" But Josh's story is not finished. About a year later he receives a package from Martiya, academic material she would like published.
Mischa is already interested. The murderer turns out to be an anthropologist; it was her academic career, not hippydom and drugs that had brought her to Thailand. The next revelation is even more interesting; Josh, who admits to being curious, decides he wants to visit this strange little woman again. On phoning the prison he is told that she is dead. "She ate a ball of opium and killed herself." Mischa replies pretty much as one might expect after only a couple of pages of his narrative voice: "Wow." It is this type of book.
Despite the vast amount of information and all the detail, Berlinski never loses his conversational guy-in-the-street tone. It is as if the entire book was written in order for him to make sense of an anecdote that he heard by chance. This attempt to make sense of one woman's crime develops into a quest; Mischa really wants to find out why an independent young academic who infiltrates a foreign culture, then settles into life there, would finally end up killing a missionary and then commit suicide.
There are a number of individuals, such as the various members of the missionary clan, who may know something. Mischa interviews several of them. He looks to the fieldwork undertaken by anthropologists. Fieldwork is about ideas as well as the ongoing crisis of culture and cultures; human duplicity and delusions. It is as much about anthropology as it is about anything. Berlinski is no stylist, and at times his imagination proves larger than his technique, but he certainly knows how to tell a story.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
