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Robert Bingham (1) (1966–1999)

Autor(a) de Lightning on the Sun: A Novel

Para outros autores com o nome Robert Bingham, ver a página de desambiguação.

3 Works 139 Membros 1 Review

Obras por Robert Bingham

Lightning on the Sun: A Novel (2000) 85 exemplares
Pure Slaughter Value: Stories (1997) 49 exemplares

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Asher, the jaded anti-hero of Lightning On The Sun, was once an idealistic young man, much like the young author who created him, Robert Bingham. I suspect to know Asher is to know a bit of Robert Bingham, since Bingham worked for a couple years (like Asher) in Cambodia as a reporter. Before Bingham (M.F.A. from Columbia University) fatally overdosed on heroin in late 1999 at the age of 33, just five months prior to the publication of his first novel, Lightning On The Sun, he'd published a short story collection, Pure Slaughter Value, and his fiction and non-fiction had appeared in The New Yorker - he was definitely destined to be a writer to keep one's eyes on in the new millenium. He'd just started his own literary journal, Open City Magazine, and he'd just gotten married. Robert Bingham had a lot going for him. Critics compared his debut novel to Robert Stone's National Book Award winning, drug smuggling masterpiece, Dog Soldiers. But Bingham, apparently, had a habit he couldn't quite kick. Much like Asher, only Asher's habits were opium, cocaine, marijuana, and vodka, rather than heroin.

Lightning On The Sun, set in 1990s Cambodia, opens with images of bats and ends with bats. Bats as we know, hang upside down. Cambodia's a nation turned upside down by the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot. By the 1990s, when we meet Asher, the Khmer Rouge has largely disintegrated in the jungles, but joined forces with an equally as heinous, if somewhat less genocidal, regime; a regime at war with another somewhat less genocidal regime, and a war which will soon erase any ideas of democracy for the nation of Cambodia.

Asher has fled L.A. to Cambodia both to try and kick his drug habit and to escape a woman who's a bad habit in her own right, Julie. Julie's got both the looks and the impressive pedigree: well educated, smart, resourceful, rich lawyer father (she should be going places too, right?), and yet, yet, like Asher, she's an addict, working as a stripper at The Stopless in L.A.

We meet the expatriate Asher at a point in his life when he can no longer stomach the political corruption he witnesses daily swarming about him in Cambodia. Perhaps if his personal life weren't so corrupt he could stomach Cambodia easier. He can stomach less the barang (American) journalists (never mind he's pretty much one of them) he must daily work with, who all drink and dish dirt day after day at the same dreary dives. Disillusioned, nearly broke, Asher hatches a plan for his escape from Cambodia back to L.A. He has just enough money, barely, to purchase just enough pure opium to give him a fresh start in the States. A clean slate. But, on his way to make the deal, Cambodian cops have other ideas, having set up shop right on the damn road - a road become toll road.

"Motherfucker," said Asher.
He tried to take a right. He couldn't. There was a car. Someone was blowing a whistle at him. There was a cop with an evil baton. It was lit red by something sinister within. The cop waved it at Asher. If he kept going they might shoot him, but maybe they wouldn't. Asher considered not stopping. It was a golden rule of the country roads; don't stop unless you have to. The whistle went off again. The whistle. It was a monster. He pulled over.

"The extortion had a semblance of bureaucracy. There were two cops going through people's papers. They had flashlights. One cop was pointing his flashlight into the face of a motorist and explaining to him how it was going to be. Asher had no papers. Asher had nothing to account for himself but three thousand dollars."


After paying the "toll," Asher, needless to say, has drastically less than three thousand dollars. But he must make this deal! He believes it his only chance to get the hell out of Cambodia for good. Enter Asher's landlord, Mr. Hawk, to the late night rescue. Mr. Hawk moonlights as a loan shark. Mr. Hawk's boss, in fact, though Asher will never know this (but Julie will) is the very man in charge of one of the mildly genocidal regimes mentioned earlier. Now, if you're intuiting at this point in the review that this intense, true-to-life, thriller-like, effing fabulous novel does not have a happy ending - SPOILER ALERT!!! SPOILER ALERT!!! - you just might (might, I say) be correct. Mr. Hawk offers Asher a deal he can't refuse: ten percent interest a week! Asher must then dupe his recent colleague acquaintance, Reese, who will soon be returning to the States for his sister's wedding, into taking along a package with him - Asher's "screenplay". Reese, naively - and unwittingly - obliges. Meanwhile, Asher has reconnected with his ex, Julie, who will intercept the package once Reese checks into his hotel, but she'll have to screw him and lace his drink first before she can get the package. And wouldn't you know it, unbeknownst to Asher, Julie's got plans of her own for the dope: mix in a little corn starch to increase its volume and, voila, she can sell it (or so she thinks) to the local street dealer for even more dough and skip town with the cash. Poor Asher! He's expecting that money to be wired into his account so that he can pay off his impatient, vindictive loan shark. He's about to get screwed himself, if not worse!

"Where's my money, Julie?" Asher pleads, and successfully convinces Julie to fly to Phnom Penh with the cash. And then all bat-shit-out-of-hell breaks loose in this edgy narrative. There's even a little person - a dwarf - Julie's sleazy Stopless employer involved in this sordid murderous mess. There's deception (including self-deception), greed, great train robberies, backstabbings, explosions of the combustible kind and also of the lust and cheap sex variety, not to mention lies, lies, and more lies, avarice, jealousy, nihilism, kidnappings, and death. Plenty of violent, gorey death. Even glorious irreligiosity put on proud, defiant display even in the imminent face of certain death. Profound - and at times - disturbing stuff. But who dies (and who doesn't)...I'll never say.

What's amazing to me about Bingham is that despite his despicably acting, amoral, overly self involved, self-destructive characters, these characters are nonetheless quite likable. Bingham, from what I've gathered, was a much more compassionate, considerate person than Asher, thank goodness (it is a work of fiction, after all, despite the obvious autobiographical elements), which accounts for how effectively he's able to make unlikable characters who behave badly nevertheless remarkably redeeming in spite of their depravity. Just like real people we all know and love. He's sympathetic to the pathetic plights his poor cast has put themselves into (who hasn't been stupid and fallen into the deep holes they've dug) and we too, despite our dismay ('don't do it, Asher, don't do it') empathize with them too.

I will say how saddening it is reading such an awesome debut from such a young and obviously gifted up-and-coming writer who lived just long enough to give us a brief glimpse of the promise he certainly would've more fully realized had a heroin addiction and overdose not intervened.
… (mais)
½
6 vote
Assinalado
absurdeist | May 20, 2009 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
3
Membros
139
Popularidade
#147,351
Avaliação
3.8
Críticas
1
ISBN
18

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