Bangkok Exit
By Ryan Humphreys
Published by Bangkok Books, 2006

The Great Farang in Thailand Book is still awaited. My review for The Nation, published on November18.

Among books that bob beneath the level of literature, some are time-wasters and, submerged below them, some just a waste of time. For the most part, Bangkok-based Canadian teacher Ryan Humphreys’ first outing manages to stay above the dross, but it often treads banal water.

The title, “Bangkok Exit”, is a mystery and the cover art baffling, though Humphreys can’t be blamed for the latter. More worrying is the fact that neither the author nor his editor can afford to buy punctuation. Maybe enough copies will sell that they can order some hyphens and apostrophes from the grammar factory.

I’m not sure what he’ll do about his word selection, though. There are many phrases that make you blink, like “dimples of sweat”.

What Humphreys is offering is copies of his letters home, not “Dear Mom” per se but the sort of stuff that newcomers share with family and friends who haven’t been to Thailand. If not outright pointless, his experiences are mild. I’m willing to bet that, given a few more years in the Kingdom, he’ll reread this and wonder what he was on about. The scales fall from farang eyes soon enough in this heat.

Bored in Vancouver, Humphreys lands in Thailand with a teaching job waiting for him. He’s hoping to find “an authentic experience that will jar, shock and challenge” him. So he’s taken by the school secretary to his assigned residence, which is a decrepit mess, and promptly gets stung by a scorpion.

Jarred and shocked, he confronts the challenge of teaching at a private school whose owner is a megalomaniac and where lunchtime sees the pupils running roughshod over the cafeteria staff. None of this would happen in Canada, he fumes. Though warned against being confrontational, he angrily sets out to correct the error of Thai cultural ways. He gets nowhere but feels smug about having tried.

On a teachers’ trek to Kanchanaburi there is the first of two drawn-out set pieces involving the school owner forcing him to do the karaoke with him. Any possibility of humour evaporates between his frumpy reluctance and his weak storytelling.

Only once in “Bangkok Exit”, in fact, does the writing find some traction – in an episode about a romantic liaison on Koh Samet. Humphreys appears to have put careful thought into words and story structure here and shares the episode with recognisable emotion. It’s a bit of a drawback that the romance is with another farang, and another that the romance, like so many other anecdotes in the book, goes nowhere.

To his credit, Humphreys doesn’t devote many paragraphs to the bar scene, leaving that vast swamp to be revisited ad nauseum by other endlessly bewitched writers. To his discredit, he affords scant space to Thais at all.

There is a bundle of core school characters, a helpful neighbour, an oddly sketched Buddhist fund-raiser, a dully painted girlfriend and a military bully, and then there are the stereotypes noted in passing. No Thai who is assessed at length comes off well.

Instead, it’s what he and the other farang did on their Siamese sojourn. They play football, they get drunk, they have a massage, they look for The Beach and, in Humphreys’ case, they endure a bizarre teacher-development camp. Again, the fun that you would think would be inherent in such a tale goes undeveloped.

Having moved on to a new post, Humphreys tries to end his book on a high note with three cheers for teaching in Thailand and here are some Web links if you’re ready to give it a go. But he’s just finished telling us, pages earlier, that he was put through a visa-mashing grinder by the vengeful, politicking owner of his original school.

So the reader is left wondering, as he was 300 pages earlier looking at the front cover, what is this book about, what can I learn from it, will I find experiences I can enjoy relating to, and/or will it at least amuse me?

If there’s nothing on TV, then.