Thirsty Ghosts

 

Perhaps one of the lasting appeals of leading a normative life in a modern, developed nation, is the shield this usually provides from the naggings of Nothingness. 

The Ballad of a Small Player is ‘sung’ by Freddy, ‘Lord Doyle’, a partially fugitive larcenist attached to the baccarat tables of Macau, who has wound up outside this bubble, and like many who find themselves in this position, exchanges active or unconscious avoidance with dependant engagement, (almost) literally going out each night to ask Nothingness for a dance.

As with Osborne’s also much enjoyed later novel The Glass Kingdom, the basic premise is the situation of an amoral white person with a hoard of loot which doesn’t really belong to them, isolated within a modern, yet dangerously abstruse section of Asia. Yet here the author also rather pleasingly locates his protagonist within the local mythology of the Hungry Ghost — and more generally those Chinese conceptions of the supernatural along with their superstitions surrounding the operations of chance.

I was long keen to acquire this book, perhaps appropriately watching as its Amazon price fluctuated alarmingly up and down rather like the shares of Nvidia, seemingly never quite sure when the right moment “to get in’ would finally arrive.

Then later reading it as I simultaneously started to get into Severance, I realised that one does not have to have experienced these precise situations in order to find them existentially creepy, thanks to an anxiety-inducing latent familiarity.

Hereabouts, us ‘hybrids’ sometimes ponder whether we are ex-pats or immigrants: innies or outies, if you like. The answer comes in part from our relationship with the everyday flimsiness of life in the partially modern environment, and those naggings of Nothingness. Whilst there are known examples of actual fugitives in this milieu, along with some partials, collectively the whole group seems to exhibit some lingering concerns regarding where they stand in regard to dematerialisation.