Another chapbook, but as always he makes the words count with more to digest in these fifty or so pages than most writers manage in a lifetime. If you've read New Juche on previous occasions, you'll be familiar with the themes - although there's no sex in this one - but each piece of writing carries a different emphasis or approaches its subject from a new angle, so continuing to yield moments of intense clarity comparable to the proverbial ray of sunlight bursting from behind a storm cloud even given the often immersive degradation of the subject. Water Margin further explores the author's relation to his environment, how he's formed by his environment in certain respects, here with particular emphasis on water as the medium which binds all things almost in the sense meant by certain pre-Christian religions. We open at the Noi Na bathhouse, subterranean and characterised by extremes of temperature, amongst foreigners who no more belong to Thai culture than does New Juche himself yet seem to define him as an outsider. This contrasts with the longer account of our man's visceral struggle with his pond which also serves as a source of food and water, and which cements him firmly into his social landscape as friends, neighbours, or relatives muck in - literally - to help with the drainage, or cooking whatever they can find slopping about in the silt and mud.
It's a physical account which very much reminds me of whatever it was that D.H. Lawrence said about the value of labour and getting one's hands dirty as a more profound and even spiritual pursuit than anything born of intellect. It also represents a communion with nature on significantly more honest terms than those usually associated with such a cliché; and either I'm yet to read another author who has truly given us anything like this (which is admittedly a possibility), or he really is something new in literary history.
