Review
Resurrection Room
2016
Lizardville Productions
Review by Peter Young in The Thai Literary Supplement #11 (December 2017).
There was a news story in the UK two decades ago about how the many unfinished novels being written by Civil Service employees in their lunch breaks were taking up so much computer memory that they were slowing down the whole system. I have no proof, but John Gartland’s first novel Orgasmus, published in 1986, might well have been one of those novels, such was the vibe it gave off of frustration with British Civil Service bureaucracy. Gartland now has a reputation as a somewhat avant garde poet on the Bangkok expat arts scene, and Resurrection Room is his second novel. A long time coming, sir.
I read Orgasmus sometime in the 1990s and it didn’t necessarily help to have read it before taking on Resurrection Room, although it did give me an idea of how Gartland would interact with his new bête noire, the Bangkok TEFL circuit, a milieu which he evidently now inhabits. The story takes place in Lizardville, a kind of alternate Bangkok, and it’s notably engaging the way it meanders seamlessly between narrators and threads, with good dialogue and a colourful chiaroscuro. It can feel aimless at times with no detectable destination, but that problem is negated by simply trusting in the narration of this fever dream and adjusting the tempo of one’s reading. Any novel in which office politics rubs shoulders with an immortal Lazarus shows an author exercising some laissez-aller with his own work, so to read it is also to participate in a novel that is in the process of finding its destination. The whole experience is actually quite fluid – don’t expect a straightforward narrative when an alternative can be this creatively inspiring.