Saint Jack
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Product Description
Product Description
Jack Flowers, saint or sinner, caught a passing bumboat into Singapore and got a job as a water-clerk to a Chinese ship chandler. Now, on the side, he offers girls (indeed 'anything, anything at all') to tourists, sailors, residents and expatriates, but he is haunted by his lack of worldly success and his fifty-three years weigh heavily on him. So when he agrees to act as blackmailer for the faintly sinister American, Edwin Shuck, in a plot against a general from Vietnam, he has high, not to mention wild, hopes of triumph.
These are the outrageous confessions of an ingenious con man in the seedy and unforgettable world of expatriates amidst imperial ruins.
About the Author
Paul Theroux's highly acclaimed books include Dark Star Safari, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, Fresh-Air Fiend, The Elephanta Suite and A Dead Hand. The Mosquito Coast and Dr Slaughter have both been made into successful films. Paul Theroux is also a frequent contributor to magazines, and divides his time between Cape Cod and the Hawaiian islands.
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1 review
Wild romp, but still just a collection of Singapore-based short stories
6 April 2012
Format:Paperback
I read one of Theroux's recent train books, Eastern Star something, and found it crotchety and misinformed. But this book I have long wanted to read for a few reasons - it is one of the few novels to be set in Singapore, where it is notorious, as is Theroux himself. Theroux also lived here for many years in the early seventies, so chances were high that it would be less misinformed (his chapter on Singapore in Ghost Train To The Eastern Star seemed also to be the less misinformed chapter of that book as well.
Saint Jack is a peculiar book, as it's all about the character development of our handsome young pimp/saint, recounting various anecdotes in this man's life that reveal something about his character. He is 53 when we catch up to him in Singapore after 13 years of living there, and slowly we piece together how he came to be in Singapore. Through his colourful descriptions of Jack's pimping, we get the sense that Theroux spent a lot of his time in Singapore doing research for the book itself. There is no plot to the book, despite what my Penguin classic says on the back about "the faintly sinister American Edwin Shuck" engaging him to set up some blackmail on a US Army general. That only occupies the final 20 pages of the book, and really isn't any more indicative of anything in it than any random selection of 20 pages throughout the rest of the book would be. We hear Jack explain Singapore, we see him explore Singapore, we see him drink with his friends in a pub, we see him open his own pub, run afoul of the local gangs, we see him deal with "the new fella" at his company, his local employers, the ships, the girls, the gangs, and the police.
Good fun, with some bad jokes thrown in. Love it! Now I want to see the movie - that was directed by Peter Bogdanovich, but banned for many years in Singapore because of some controversy swirling around it.
Saint Jack is a peculiar book, as it's all about the character development of our handsome young pimp/saint, recounting various anecdotes in this man's life that reveal something about his character. He is 53 when we catch up to him in Singapore after 13 years of living there, and slowly we piece together how he came to be in Singapore. Through his colourful descriptions of Jack's pimping, we get the sense that Theroux spent a lot of his time in Singapore doing research for the book itself. There is no plot to the book, despite what my Penguin classic says on the back about "the faintly sinister American Edwin Shuck" engaging him to set up some blackmail on a US Army general. That only occupies the final 20 pages of the book, and really isn't any more indicative of anything in it than any random selection of 20 pages throughout the rest of the book would be. We hear Jack explain Singapore, we see him explore Singapore, we see him drink with his friends in a pub, we see him open his own pub, run afoul of the local gangs, we see him deal with "the new fella" at his company, his local employers, the ships, the girls, the gangs, and the police.
Good fun, with some bad jokes thrown in. Love it! Now I want to see the movie - that was directed by Peter Bogdanovich, but banned for many years in Singapore because of some controversy swirling around it.
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